"I'd sooner live with him in Stepney——"
"And eat fried fish?"
"And smell fried fish—it's the smell I hate—than live in a garden of roses by Bendemeer's stream with anybody else."
"My poor Betty, you have the disease badly."
Betty, however, did not mention Mark's physical weakness to her friend. Instead, she prattled of love for nearly an hour.
The elder woman told herself that she was listening to an idyll; but, vividly as the tale was presented, a sense of unreality pervaded it; the conviction that, as a child would put it, the story was too good to be true. But because of its goodness Lady Randolph was the more touched by it. Your honest cynic respects good, although he rails against its counterfeit. Moreover, in this joyous acclamation of love, Lady Randolph resumed for a few moments her own youth. It seemed incredible that she should have grown old, and critical, and distrustful. Love touched her with healing fingers, and she became as a little child, free from the dull limitations of age and experience.
"You have been so sympathetic," said Betty, when she bade her old friend good night, "but I know, of course, that in your heart of hearts you think us two fools."
"Not fools, Betty. Babes in the wood, perhaps, playing amongst the rose leaves. Good night, my dear; go and dream of your lover."
But when the door was shut, the woman of the world sighed, and her shrewd face puckered into many wrinkles.
"Am I a fool?" she asked herself. "Should I have stopped this? I fear that it will come to nothing, but then it will be everything, everything, everything to them—while it lasts."