“Aren’t you hard on him? He may have been close to their quarters,” she suggested, “and just turned in.”
“I dare say! He would not have found it so convenient if Helen Arbuthnot hadn’t been then.” Mrs Leslie liked to justify her statements.
“No?” said Claudia indifferently. It would have taken a close observer to note a certain slight rigidity in the way she carried her head.
“No. My dear Claudia, it’s all very well to be magnanimous, but if you expect peace in your married life, you had better make up your mind to the fact that Arthur—though a good fellow in the main—is a bit of a flirt.”
Claudia did not turn her head.
“I dare say,” she said coolly, so coolly that Mrs Leslie prepared to strengthen her warning.
“And I advise you to show him you don’t like it—beforehand.”
“Thank you.”
Mrs Leslie could not have quite explained the character of this “thank you,” but she preferred to consider that it breathed gratitude; and the morning having in other ways proved such a dismal failure, accepted this as partial compensation, feeling that now she had done her best to open Claudia’s eyes, and that, whatever happened, she could not be blamed for having uttered no warning.
She had been altogether tired and annoyed by her long vain tramp, and was not in the mood to spare her brother. Claudia, too, had been so provokingly quiescent that it was only to be supposed she did not see, and Arthur’s wife would require to have all her senses about her.