“I’m sure John Rizzio is flattered at your choice. Cyril is an old dear. But to marry! I’d as soon take the automatic chess player. Why are you going to marry Cyril, Doris?” she asked.
A long pause and more powder.
“I’m not sure that I am. I don’t even know why I thought him possible. I think it’s the feeling of the potter for his clay. Something might be made of him. He seems so helpless somehow. Men of his sort always are. I’d like to mother him. Besides”—and she flashed around on her hostess brightly—“he does sit a horse like a centaur.”
“He’s also an excellent shot, a good chauffeur, a tolerable dancer and the best bat in England, all agreeable talents in a gentleman of fashion but—er—hardly——” Lady Betty burst into laughter. “Good Lord, Doris! Cyril a firebrand!”
Doris Mather eyed her hostess reproachfully and moved toward the door into the hallway.
“Come, Betty,” she said with some dignity, “are you ready to go down?”
All of which goes to show that matches are not made in Heaven and that the motives of young women in making important decisions are actuated by the most unimportant details. Hammersley’s good fortune was still a secret except to Miss Mather’s most intimate friends, but the conviction was slowly growing in the mind of the girl that unless Cyril stopped sitting around in tweeds when everybody else was getting into khaki, the engagement would never be announced. As the foreign situation had grown more serious she had seen other men who weighed less than Cyril throw off the boredom of their London habits and go soldiering into France. But the desperate need of his country for able-bodied men had apparently made no impression upon the placid mind of the Honorable Cyril. It was as unruffled as a highland lake in mid-August. He had contributed liberally from his large means to Lady Heathcote’s Ambulance Fund, but his manner had become, if anything, more bored than ever.
Miss Mather entered the drawing-room thoughtfully with the helpless feeling of one who, having made a mistake, pauses between the alternatives of tenacity and recantation. And yet as soon as she saw him a little tremor of pleasure passed over her. In spite of his drooping pose, his vacant stare, his obvious inadequacy she was sure there was something about Cyril Hammersley that made him beyond doubt the most distinguished-looking person in the room—not even excepting Rizzio.
He came over to her at once, the monocle dropping from his eye.