“Little Leo—the boy poet you remember last night,” she rattled on in a patent attempt to escape from her confusion. “He’s madly in love with Paula, too. I’ve heard Aaron Hancock chaffing him about some sonnet cycle, and it isn’t difficult to guess the inspiration. And Terrence—the Irishman, you know—he’s mildly in love with her. They can’t help it, you see; and can you blame them?”
“She surely deserves it all,” Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even mildly be in love with the Little Lady. “She is most deserving of all men’s admiration,” he continued smoothly. “From the little I’ve seen of her she’s quite remarkable and most charming.”
“She’s my half-sister,” Ernestine vouchsafed, “although you wouldn’t dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins. She’s so different. She’s different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew— though she isn’t exactly a girl. She’s thirty-eight, you know—”
“Pussy, pussy,” Graham whispered.
The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment, taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.
“Cat,” he censured in mock reproof.
“Oh!” she cried. “I never meant it that way. You will find we are very frank here. Everybody knows Paula’s age. She tells it herself. I’m eighteen—so, there. And now, just for your meanness, how old are you?”
“As old as Dick,” he replied promptly.
“And he’s forty,” she laughed triumphantly. “Are you coming swimming? —the water will be dreadfully cold.”
Graham shook his head. “I’m going riding with Dick.”