“Damn my eyes!” the young man pronounced. “If one’s to be a dozen times a day at the house it’s a great deal more convenient to sleep there. I’m sick of travelling up and down this beastly Avenue.”
Since he had determined to go Percy would of course have been very sorry to allow him to go alone; he was a man of many scruples—in the direction in which he had any at all—and he remembered his promise to the Duchess. It was obviously the memory of this promise that made Mr. Beaumont say to his companion a couple of days later that he rather wondered he should be so fond of such a girl.
“In the first place how do you know how fond I am?” asked Lord Lambeth. “And in the second why shouldn’t I be fond of her?”
“I shouldn’t think she’d be in your line.”
“What do you call my ‘line’? You don’t set her down, I suppose, as ‘fast’?”
“Exactly so. Mrs. Westgate tells me that there’s no such thing as the fast girl in America; that it’s an English invention altogether and that the term has no meaning here.”
“All the better. It’s an animal I detest,” said Lord Lambeth.
“You prefer, then, rather a priggish American précieuse?”
Lord Lambeth took his time. “Do you call Miss Alden all that?”
“Her sister tells me,” said Percy Beaumont, “that she’s tremendously literary.”