'Une causerie de femme! que dites-vous?—je le suis—l'amour n'existe plus, et l'âme de l'homme est plus près des sens que l'âme de la femme,' said Milord. Everyone laughed; and, with a charming movement of her skirts, Mrs. Barton made room for him to sit beside her.
Harding withdrew to the other end of the room to resume his reading, and Alice did not dare to hope that he would lay aside his book and come to talk to her. If he did, her mother would ask her to introduce him to her, and she would have to enter into explanations that he and she had merely exchanged a few words before dinner.
She withstood the conversation of the charmed circle as long as she could, and then boldly crossed the room for a newspaper. Harding rose to help her to find one, and they talked together till Milord took him away to the billiard-room.
May, who had been vainly expecting Fred the whole evening, said:
'Well, Alice, I hope you have had a nice flirtation?'
'And did you notice, May, how she left us to look for a newspaper. Our Alice is fond of reading, but it was not of reading she was thinking this evening. She kept him all to herself at the other end of the room.' Mrs. Barton laughed merrily, and Alice began to understand that her mother was approving her flirtation. That is the name that her mother would give her talk with Mr. Harding.
XVI
During the Dublin Season it is found convenient to give teas: the young ladies have to be introduced to the men they will meet after at the Castle. These gatherings take place at five o'clock in the afternoon; and as Mrs. Barton started from the Shelbourne Hotel for Lady Georgina Stapleton's, she fell to thinking that a woman is never really vulnerable until she is bringing out her daughters. Till then the usual shafts directed against her virtue fall harmlessly on either side, but now they glance from the marriage buckler and strike the daughter in full heart. In the ball-room, as in the forest, the female is most easily assailed when guarding her young, and nowhere in the whole animal kingdom is this fact so well exemplified as in Dublin Castle.
Lady Georgina lived in Harcourt Street, and it was on her way thither that something like a regret rose up in Mrs. Barton that she had (she was forced to confess it) aroused the enmity of women, and persistently.
Lady Georgina Stapleton was Lord Dungory's eldest sister. She, too, hated Mrs. Barton; but, being poor (Milord used to call himself the milch-cow), she found herself, like the Ladies Cullen, occasionally obliged to smile upon and extend a welcoming hand to the family enemy; and when Mrs. Barton came to Dublin for the Castle Season, a little pressure was put upon Lady Georgina to obtain invitations from the Chamberlain; the ladies exchanged visits, and there the matter ended, as Mrs. Barton and her daughter passed through Stephen's Green, and she remembered that she had never taken the trouble to conceal her dislike of the house in Harcourt Street, and some of the hard things she had said when standing on the box-seat of a drag at Punchestown Races had travelled back and had found a lasting resting-place in Lady Georgina's wrathful memory.