Merle was lying on the couch, her back supported by many cushions, a silken wrap thrown lightly over her feet. For Madame des Essarts cherished the notion that constitutions of delicate birth were necessarily also of delicate health, to attain which desirable consummation, she kept a venerable and witty doctor in daily attendance, and reduced Merle on the slightest provocation from the vertical to the horizontal.
Peter tossed down her hat, and sank into a curly-legged arm-chair.
“I wish this weren’t such an impossible room,” she grumbled; “what with gilt and tapestries and priceless china and painted ladies on the ceiling, I can hardly hear myself speak. It’s the sort of room you can’t take up and wrap round you. What we ought to do, Merle, is with the aid of a ladder, a big apron, and a bottle of gum, cover the walls ourselves in brown paper, like those brave bright Bohemian bachelor girls in books.”
“Well?” quoth Merle again, disregarding the Bohemian girls.
“And then the supreme insult of a central heating system, when every fibre of me yearns for firelight. How would it be to light a fire of sticks on the carpet? Would your grandmother mind?”
“Shouldn’t think so,” murmured Merle. “It’s only Aubusson, and she’s a reasonable woman, and you could always explain to her that you were being the Swiss Family Robinson.”
“Or Robinson Crusoe. Why, do you suppose, are shipwrecked islanders always called Robinson? Is it something wild and primitive that lies in the name?”
“You know,” Merle suggested gently, “it’s not necessary to be quite so garrulous, to convince me that you want to hear about Stuart Heron.”
Peter gave in: “Who is he?”