“You have had him hanging about for months,” I said, “I expect he and Joan thought you approved.”
“They did. They do. But that doesn’t make it any better. Of course I said I would not allow it, and Joan was amazed and cried all night, and Gertrude is in a state of such nervous tension you can’t go near her, and poor old Jones, who came back preening herself, is bathed in tears—and Gertrude says I have got to speak to Wilson at once. She always says things have got to be done at once.”
He groaned, and sat down heavily on my low wall, crushing a branch of verbena.
“It’s not as if I hadn’t warned Gertrude,” he went on. “I said to her several times ‘I’m always catching my foot against Wilson,’ and yet she would have him about the place. She as good as told me she thought he and Dulcie might make a match of it. But it’s my opinion Dulcie never so much as looked at him. I told Gertrude so, but she only smiled, and said I was to leave it to her, and that it was in those confounded stars that Dulcie would marry almost at once. This is what her beastly stars have brought us to.”
“She did tell me there was an early marriage for Joan, too, in her horoscope,” I hazarded.
“Well, we had had thoughts, I mean Gertrude had, that young Vavasour came over oftener than he need. He’s rather a bent lily, but of course he’s an uncommonly good match. I should not have thought there was anything in it, myself, but Gertrude kept rubbing it in. That is why they went to Lee.”
“You don’t say so!”
“Yes, I do say so. But look how it has turned out.”
“I think I ought to tell you—I’m so astonished that even now I don’t know how to believe it—I only heard of it last night,—that Dulcie has accepted Mr. Vavasour.”