'First Old Bachelor: "Et les jeunes filles? Aime-tu ça? Toi?"
'Second Old Bachelor: "Hélas! mon ami, je commence!"'
Wantley bit his lip. He could not help smiling. 'You have not shown her that?' he asked suspiciously.
'No, indeed! How could you think such a thing, even of me?' Mrs. Robinson rose; she came and stood by him, and as their eyes met he saw that she was strangely moved. 'Ah, Ludovic,' she said softly, 'you are a lucky man!'
He looked away. 'Do you really think that she likes being with me?' he asked awkwardly.
'Yes, even better than with me—now!' The young man knew, rather than saw, that her eyes were full of tears, and in spite of his absorption in himself and his own affairs, he found time to wonder why Penelope was so unlike herself—so gentle, so moved. Her next words confirmed his feeling of uneasy astonishment, for, 'You won't ever set her against me,' she asked, 'whatever happens, will you?'
Wantley felt amused and a little touched. 'My dear Penelope!' he cried, 'I think it's my turn now to ask you how you could think such a thing, even of me? Also I must say you do her a great injustice. Why, she loves you with all her heart! Not even'—he used the first simile that came into his mind—'not even an angel with a flaming sword would keep her from you.'
'No; but some Roman Catholic notion of obedience to one's lawful owner might prove more tangible than a flaming sword!'
The harsh words grated on Wantley's ear; he wondered why women sometimes put things so much more coarsely than a man, in a similar case, would do.
But before he could answer Penelope had moved away, and, with a complete change of voice, and a return of her usual rather disdainful serenity of manner, was saying: 'I see Sir George Downing coming up from the Beach Room. By the way, I want to tell you that he finds he can't work properly with so many people about, and I have suggested that he should put in a few days at Kingpole Farm. I believe the lodgings there are very comfortable, and the place has the further advantage of being near Shagisham. You know he wishes to meet David Winfrith, and I thought, perhaps, that the introduction'—Penelope now spoke with nervous hesitation—'would come better from you.'