“No, it’s me. Now go to bed and sleep on it.”
“I sha’n’t. I couldn’t sleep on anything so hard. Dear me, what a lot of hair-pins you have! What nice ones! I must borrow some.”
“Take them all and go.”
“Not yet.”
“I shall blow out the candles,” snapped Olive.
“I love talking in the dark. I’m pining for feminine conversation to soothe my overwrought nerves. How pretty that lace is!” Eleanor touched her friend’s shoulder cajolingly. “What exquisite things you have! Everything—from hair-pins to carving-knives—perfect after its kind, like the animals that went into the ark. It will be difficult to give you a wedding present.”
Olive laughed, despite herself.
“The only wedding present a woman wants is a husband.”
“You have had plenty of those presents offered you, dear.”
Olive shuddered violently. “Imagine existence with a Guardsman or—worse!—with that doddering young Duke! Dulness without idealism. Your Matthew Strang is endurable—he has at least the family idealism, the Strang goodness, though he carries it so much more heavily than his cousin. But a lifetime with a dull man—who wouldn’t understand a joke—who would smile and smile and be a hypocrite! Oh, ye gods! I should shriek! In a year I should be in a lunatic asylum, or the Divorce Court. Oh, why do you women who have been through the mill egg us girls on? Is it the same instinct that makes an ex-fag send his boy to Eton? Or do you think it improves our health? I know you think me hysterical.”