“Nothing of the sort,” he rumbled.
Mrs. Dandridge’s face softened to wistfulness. “Shirley, am I?” she asked, with a quizzical, almost a droll uneasiness. “Why, I’ve got every emotion I’ve ever had. I read all the new French novels, and I’m even thinking of going in for the militant suffragette movement.”
The girl had tossed her hat and crop on the table and seated herself by her mother’s chair. Now reaching down, she drew one of the fragile blue-veined hands up against her cheek, her bronze hair, its heavy coil loosened, dropping over one shoulder like sunlit seaweed. “What was it he said, dearest?”
“He thinks I ought to wear a worsted shawl and arctics.” Her mother thrust out one little thin-slippered foot, with its slender ankle gleaming through its open-work stocking like mother-of-pearl. “Imagine! In May. And he knows I’m vain of my feet! Major, if you had ever had a wife, you would have learned wisdom. But you mean well, and I’ll take back what I said about the julep. You mix it, Shirley. Yours is even better than Ranston’s.
“She makes me one every day, Monty,” she continued, as Shirley went into the house. “And when she isn’t looking, I pour it into the bush there. See those huge, maudlin-looking roses? That’s the shameless result. It’s a new species. I’m going to name it Tipsium Giganticum.”
Major Bristow laughed as he bit the end off a cigar. “All the same,” he said in his big rumbling voice, “you need ’em, I reckon. You need more than mint-juleps, too. You leave the whisky to me and the doctor, and you take Shirley and pull out for Italy. Why not? A year there would do you a heap of good.”
She shook her head. “No, Monty. It isn’t what you think. It’s—here.” She lifted her hand and touched her heart. “It’s been so for a long time. But it may—it can’t go on forever, you see. Nothing can.”
The major had leaned forward in his chair. “Judith!” he said, and his hand twitched, “it isn’t true!” And then, “How do you know?”
She smiled at him. “You remember when that big surgeon from Vienna came to see the doctor last year? Well, the doctor brought him to me. I’d known it before in a way, but it had gone farther than I thought. No one can tell just how long it may be. It may be years, of course, but I’m not taking any sea trips, Monty.”
He cleared his throat and his voice was husky when he spoke. “Shirley doesn’t know?”