Life had been very kind to Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche, yet they did not look conspicuously happy. With both hands it had lavished upon them its material best, but the gifts of fortune were taken as a matter of mere personal right. Providence owed it to the order of things they stood for. Far from being grateful, they were a little bored by its attentions. Moreover, these young women had not learned to regard people to whom the fairies had been less kind with either insight or sympathy. Their judgments were objective, therefore they were a little hard, a little lacking in tolerance.
II
“The stage!” said Marjorie with a straight-lipped smile, a rather famous part of her importance.
“You think so?” said Blanche sleepily. But she was not at all sleepy, else she would not have been able to handle the Tiger, a recent purchase, in the way she was doing at the moment.
“No mistaking it, my dear.”
“Good-looking, though,” lisped the somnolent Blanche, giving the Tiger a very shrewd kick with a roweled heel. “Reminds me of some one.”
The Tiger, worried by a bit that he didn’t like, and greatly affronted by the heel of his new mistress, which he liked still less, then began to behave in a way which for some little time quite forbade any further discussion of the subject.
For the rest of the morning, however, it was never far from the minds of these ladies. Two or three times they caught sight in the distance of Jack and his charge. A striking-looking girl, but she didn’t in the least know how to ride. And somehow from that fact Blanche and Marjorie seemed to draw spiritual consolation.
At twelve o’clock they left the Park. The policeman at the gate pulled himself together and regarded them respectfully. An elderly lady in a high-hung barouche of prehistoric design, drawn by a superb pair of horses and surmounted by a romantic-looking coachman and footman, called out to them in a remarkably strident voice as they passed her, “I am coming to luncheon.”
“Bother!” said Marjorie to Blanche.