“Prepare yourself for the worst, my dear Emily. I’ll wager you this purse I’m netting that Miss Percy will have the first proposal of the season. She may differ from the prevailing mode in young ladies, but she was fashioned to be the mother of fine healthy children; and young men, who are human and normal au fond, whatever their ridiculous affectations, will not be long in responding, whether they know what is the matter with them or not.”
Anne blushed at this plain speaking, and Mrs. Nunn bridled. “I wish you would remember that young girls——”
“You told me yourself that she was two-and-twenty. She ought to have three babies by this time. It is a shocking age for an unmarried female. You have not made up your mind to be an old maid, I suppose?” she queried, pushing up her spectacles and dropping her netting. “If so, I’ll turn matchmaker myself. I should succeed far better than Emily Nunn, for I have married off five nieces of my own. Now don’t say that you have. You look as if it were on the tip of your tongue. All girls say it when there is no man in sight. I shall hate you if you are not as little commonplace as you look.”
Anne shrugged her shoulders and said nothing, while Lady Hunsdon remarked with her peremptory smile (this was one of a well known set): “We have wandered far from the subject of Mr. Warner. Not so far either, for my son tells me, Miss Percy, that you have kindly consented to meet him—to help us, in fact. I hope you have no objections to bring forward, Emily. I am very much set upon this matter of reclaiming the poet. And as I can see that Miss Percy has independence of character, and as I feel sure that she has not come to Nevis on the catch, she can be of the greatest possible assistance to me. What Constance says of the other young ladies is only too true. They will pretend to comply, but gracefully evade any responsibility. I can count upon none of them except Mary Denbigh, and she is rather passée, poor thing.”
“Passée?” cried Lady Constance. “At thirty? What do you expect? She looks like an elegiac figure weeping on a tombstone. I can’t stand the sight of her. And it’s all kept up to make herself interesting. Edwin Hay has been dead eleven years——”
“Never mind poor Mary. We all know she is your pet abomination——”
“She gives me a cramp in my spleen.”
“Well, to return to Mr. Warner. Will you all meet him when I ask him to my sitting-room up-stairs? Will you spread the news of his coming among the other guests? Hint that he has reformed? Excite in them a desire to meet the great man?”
She did not speak in a tone of appeal, and there was a mounting fire in her eye.
Lady Constance shrugged her shoulders. “You mean that you will cut us if we don’t. I never quarrel in the tropics. Besides, I have buried too many of my old friends! I don’t approve, but I shall be interested, and my morals are as pure and solid as my new teeth. If you can marry him to Mary Denbigh and leave her on the island——”