"And how old was Aunt Annie when she did?"
"Annie's about thirty-seven," her mother considered. "She was about twenty-five. But why, dear?"
"Nothing," said Leslie, and fell silent.
She was still in the silk blouse and short homespun skirt that she had worn at the athletic club luncheon, but she had thrown aside her loose woolly coat, and the narrow furs that were no softer than her own fair skin. Flung back into a deep chair, and relaxed after her vigorous day, she looked peculiarly childish and charming, her grandmother thought. She was like both her aunts, with Annie's fair, almost ashen hair and Alice's full, pretty mouth. But she was more squarely built than either, and a hint of a tip, at the end of her nose, gave her an expression at once infantile and astonished. When Leslie opened her blue eyes widely, and stared at anything, she looked like an amazed baby, and the effect of her round eyes and tilted nose was augmented by her very fair skin, and by just a sixteenth of an inch shortness in her upper lip. Of course she knew all this. Her acquaintance with her own good and bad points had begun in school days, and while through her grandmother's care her teeth were being straightened, and her eyes and throat subjected to mild forms of surgery, her Aunt Annie had seen to it that her masses of fair hair had been burnished and groomed, her hands scraped and polished into beauty, and finally that her weight was watched with scrupulous care. Nature had perhaps intended Leslie to be plump and ruddy, but modern fashion had decreed otherwise, and, with half the girls of her own age and set, Leslie took saccharine in her tea, rarely touched sweets or fried food, and had the supreme satisfaction of knowing that she was actually too slim and too willowy for her height, and interestingly colourless into the bargain.
Could Acton possibly have said anything definite to start this unusual train of thought, the grandmother speculated. With Leslie so felicitously married, she would have felt ready for her nunc dimittis. She watched Leslie expectantly. But the girl was apparently dreaming, and was staring absently at the tip of one sturdy oxford above which a stretch of thick white woollen stocking was visible almost to her knee.
"How can they fall in love with them, dressed like Welsh peasants!" the grandmother said to herself, in mild disapproval. And aloud she said: "Ah, don't, lovey!"
For Leslie had taken out a small gold case, and was regarding it thoughtfully.
"My first to-day, on my honour!" Leslie said, as she lazily lighted a sweet-scented cigarette. It never occurred to her to pay any attention to her grandmother's protest, for Grandmother had been regularly protesting against everything Leslie had done since her adored and despotic childhood. She had fainted when Leslie had dived off the dock at Newport, and had wept when Leslie had galloped through the big iron gates on her own roan stallion; she had called in Christopher, as Leslie's guardian, when Leslie, at fifteen, had calmly climbed into one of the big cars, and driven it seven miles, alone and unadvised, and totally without instruction or experience. Leslie knew that this half-scandalized and wholly-admiring opposition was one of her grandmother's secret satisfactions, and she combatted it only mechanically.
"Have one, Grandma?"
"Have one—you wild girl you! I'd like to know what a nice young man thinks when a refined girl offers him——"