“Well, you’ll make it what no one has done yet if you take that young lady to America and make her happy there.”
“Do you think our country, then, such a very dreadful place?”
His hostess had a pause. “It’s not a question of what I think, but of what she will.”
Jackson rose from his chair and took up his hat and stick. He had actually turned a little pale with the force of his emotion; there was a pang of wrath for him in this fact that his marriage to Lady Barbarina might be looked at as too high a flight. He stood a moment leaning against the mantelpiece and very much tempted to say to Mrs. Freer that she was a vulgar-minded old woman. But he said something that was really more to the point. “You forget that she’ll have her consolations.”
“Don’t go away or I shall think I’ve offended you. You can’t console an injured noblewoman.”
“How will she be injured? People will be charming to her.”
“They’ll be charming to her—charming to her!” These words fell from the lips of Dexter Freer, who had opened the door of the room and stood with the knob in his hand, putting himself into relation to his wife’s talk with their visitor. This harmony was achieved in an instant. “Of course I know whom you mean,” he said while he exchanged greetings with Jackson. “My wife and I—naturally we’re great busybodies—have talked of your affair and we differ about it completely. She sees only the dangers, while I see all the advantages.”
“By the advantages he means the fun for us,” Mrs. Freer explained, settling her sofa-cushions.
Jackson looked with a certain sharp blankness from one of these disinterested judges to the other; even yet they scarce saw how their misdirected freedom wrought on him. It was hardly more agreeable to him to know that the husband wished to see Lady Barb in America than to know that the wife waved away such a vision. There was that in Dexter Freer’s face which seemed to forecast the affair as taking place somehow for the benefit of the spectators. “I think you both see too much—a great deal too much—in the whole thing,” he rather coldly returned.
“My dear young man, at my age I may take certain liberties,” said Dexter Freer. “Do what you’ve planned—I beseech you to do it; it has never been done before.” And then as if Jackson’s glance had challenged this last assertion he went on: “Never, I assure you, this particular thing. Young female members of the British aristocracy have married coachmen and fishmongers and all that sort of thing; but they’ve never married you and me.”