“All that!” and Diana waved her hand expressively. “Pa’s not a bit ‘stunned with grief and horror!’ You couldn’t fancy him in such a condition if you tried! And mother is not in the least ‘beside herself.’ She’s probably ordering her mourning. Why, they are already parcelling out my trinkets, and before I’ve been ‘drowned’ twenty-four hours they’re thinking of sending you my wristlet watch by way of an ‘In Memoriam.’ I hope they will,—I should love you to have it! But people who are ‘stunned with grief and horror’ and ‘beside themselves’ are not able to make all these little arrangements so quickly! Ah, Sophy! An hour ago I was actually fancying that perhaps I had behaved cruelly,—there was a stupid, lingering sentiment in my mind that suggested the possible suffering and despair of my father and mother at having lost me!—but after that letter I am reassured! I know I have done the right thing.”
Sophy looked at her with a smile.
“You are a curious creature!” she said. “Surely Pa expresses himself very touchingly?”
“Too touchingly by half!” answered Diana. “Had he really felt the grief he professes to feel, he could not have written to you or to any other friend for several days about it——”
“Perhaps,” interrupted Sophy, “he thought it would be in the papers, and that unless he wrote it might be taken for someone else——”
“He knew it would be in the papers,” said Diana, “and naturally wished to let his acquaintances know that he, and no other man of the name of May, is the bereaved father of the domestic melodrama. Well!”—and she shook back her hair over her shoulders—“it’s finished! I am dead!—and ‘born again,’ as the Scripture saith,—at rather a mature age!—but I may yet turn out worth regenerating!—who knows?”
She laughed, and turned to the dressing-table to complete her toilette. Sophy put affectionate arms about her.
“You are a dear, strange, clever, lovable thing, anyway!” she said. “But really, I’ve had quite a sleepless night thinking about that Dr. Dimitrius! He may be a secret investigator or a spy, and if you go to him he may want you to do all sorts of dreadful, even criminal things!——”
“But I shouldn’t do them!” laughed Diana. “Sophy, have you no confidence in my mental balance?”
“I have, but some people wouldn’t,” Sophy replied. “They would say that a woman of your age ought to know better than to leave a comfortable home where you had only the housekeeping to do, and give up the chance of an ample income at your parents’ death, just to go away on a wild-goose chase after new adventures, and all because you imagined you weren’t loved! Oh, dear! Love is only ‘a springe to catch woodcocks!’ as the venerable Polonius so wisely remarks in Hamlet. I know a sneering cynic who says that women are always ‘asking for love!’”