She seemed to regard this proposition at first as complicated; but she did what she could for me. “Oh he’s not changeable. If he were changeable—”
Then, however, she paused. I daresay she had been going to observe that if he were changeable he would long ago have given her up. After an instant she went on: “He wouldn’t have stuck so to his profession. You can’t make much by it.”
I sought to attenuate her rather odd maidenly grimness. “It depends on what you call much.”
“It doesn’t make you rich.”
“Oh of course you’ve got to practise it—and to practise it long.”
“Yes—so Mr. Porterfield says.”
Something in the way she uttered these words made me laugh—they were so calm an implication that the gentleman in question didn’t live up to his principles. But I checked myself, asking her if she expected to remain in Europe long—to what one might call settle.
“Well, it will be a good while if it takes me as long to come back as it has taken me to go out.”
“And I think your mother said last night that it was your first visit.”
Miss Mavis, in her deliberate way, met my eyes. “Didn’t mother talk!”