"If you wish it—and my dress is not too grave in hue"—
"And too decorous in its make, you were about to add, I presume;" he finished the sentence bluntly. "It forms a refreshing contrast to the prevailing style around us."
Lucy here flitted into sight, and her very bare arms and shoulders pointed her husband's strictures. A stool, brought into the room for the use of some child or invalid looker-on of the festivities, now stood empty under Sarah's chair, and Philip, espying it, seized upon and drew it forth. When seated, his mouth was nearly on a level with Sarah's ear.
"This is pleasant!" he said. "We are quite as much isolated from the rest of mankind as if we were sitting among the heathery hillocks on Deal Beach. You do not love the visions of those tranquil sunny days as I do. You never allude to them voluntarily. Yet you have had less to convert your dreams into every-day actualities, tedious and prosaic, than I have. I stand in direful need of one of the old lectures, inculcating more charity, and less study of complex motives and biassed tendencies in the machine we call Man. Begin! I am at your mercy."
"I have forgotten how to deliver them. I am out of practice."
"That is not surprising. Your husband is behind the age he lives in—and so are you. You two would make Barnum's fortune, could he ever persuade the public of your idiosyncrasies."
"What are you talking about?"
"Look around and through this room, and you will understand one part of my meaning. Do you remark the preponderance of married over single belles? and that the most tenderly deferential cavaliers are husbands, and not dancing with their wives? I could point out to you three men, leaders of the ton in this extremely reputable, eminently moral assembly, who, it is whispered among the knowing ones, are married, and, having left their domestic associations for a season of recreation, boldly attach themselves to certain stylish young ladies here, and challenge observation, defy public censure, by their marked and increasing devotion. I meet them strolling along the beach in the morning; riding together in the afternoon; and when not engaged in this evening exhibition of toilet and muscle, you will find them pacing the moon or star-lit piazza, or, perchance, again sentimentalizing on the shore until the witching hour draws near."
"You surprise me!"
"You have no right to be surprised. You have the same thing continually before you in your city. Every fashionable hotel or boarding-house can supply you with such flirtations by the dozen. A married woman who declines the polite services of all gentlemen, except her husband and near relatives, is a prude, with false scruples of propriety and delicacy. Let her legal partner complain—he is cried out upon as a despot, and you can trust the sweet angel of an abused wife to elude his vigilance—violence, she terms it—for the future, without altering her conduct in aught else. Do you see that pretty woman in blue—the one with the madonna-like face? Her tyrant is here but once a week—from Saturday until Monday—then hies back to the business he loves as well as she does her pleasure. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and the forenoon of Saturday, any mustachioed puppy may walk, talk, drive, and flirt with her—bask in the rays of those liquid orbs. When the rightful lord appears, she is demure as a nun, patient as a saint, dutiful as Griselda, to him and him alone. Do you begin to understand why I congratulated you upon having a husband of the olden stamp? Why, I do from my heart felicitate my friend Hammond upon having gained, as a helpmeet, one of that nearly obsolete species—Woman!"