"Are you still of the same mind about Trotting?" Carlton Mackrell asked Gay as they sat at the dainty, rose-lit table of the dining-room in Connaught Square a few nights later.
"Why, of course!" Gay said reproachfully. "I never change my mind once it's made up, do I, dear?" and she appealed to her brother.
The Professor looked at her with his soup spoon poised between his plate and his mouth.
"Never is a very positive statement," he said, "but I think you are fairly consistent when you have made up what you are pleased to call your mind, Gay."
Carlton Mackrell glanced at the girl, then at her brother, and smiled.
What a contrast these two were, to be sure! Gay, so full of life, and fun, and spirits, bent on finding and enjoying all the good things of the world, without a care, apparently, and her brother, a prematurely aged, dry-as-dust specimen, with no ambition whatever beyond his musty books, and test-tubes, and things, and with a precision of thought and speech that must surely get on Gay's nerves terribly!
Doubtless the man had his good points, but it was an axiom of Carlton's, that unless a person's virtues struck one at once, life was too short to waste in trying to discover them. As a practical man about town—and there is no finer school for the observation of character than cosmopolitan society—he had learnt to "size-up," as he expressed it, a man on sight, and only on rare occasions had to acknowledge to a mistake.
"I wonder how you came to take up Trotting, Mr. Mackrell? It's much safer, don't you think, than 'chasing?'" said Gay, as she helped herself from a dish handed by a particularly pretty parlour-maid. "Mr. Hannen loves it—but gets more hard knocks than ha'pence. After a more than usually crushing 'downer,' in which his head suffered most, he was warned last year by an eminent specialist that another tap on the same spot would probably prove fatal—" She paused abruptly as the Professor nodded.
It would be hard to explain how his nod expressed the opinion that another such fatality would be well deserved, but it did, and Gay's eyes flashed whole volumes of indignation that did not escape Carlton—he loved a woman of spirit.
"I don't think I ever told you of my first real introduction to Trotting, and how it came about?" he said, breaking a rather strained silence, and Gay shook her head, while the Professor, with some ostentation, devoted himself to his dinner.