“Smoke? No—but Eustace likes me to sit with him, and we smoke—you get to like it in hot climates.”
“I shouldn’t have let you smoke if you had been mine.”
“No?” she laughed gently. “Dear old Marcus!”
Looking at Sibyl, and finding her so perfectly satisfying to his artistic sense, he fell to wondering what Diana was really like. And whom she was like? He dared not ask. He had no wish to hear she was like her father. She could not be like her mother or the papers would be bound to have got hold of it. He was glad they hadn’t—but still girls far less pretty were advertised.
“I’m so glad,” said Sibyl; “it shows you won’t let Diana.”
“Smoke? No, certainly not.”
“You don’t know Diana—I must tell you about her—a little about her, without saying she is like her father, is that it?” She laughed—how gay she was! When she had told him that little, omitting that much, she asked: “Does she sound nice?” And Marcus, smiling, said she sounded delicious.
“She is.”
Marcus laughed; this was the old Sibyl back again, with all her enthusiasms, the same charming companion she had been as a girl. Because of that charm of hers, he liked to think, he had not married.
“Sibyl, is she like you?” he asked impatiently.