“It’s an awful responsibility, Edward, to marry people these days! Fanny, give me a cup of tea. I feel a little faint. Was that water boiling, child, when you made it? Some of the tea-leaves are floating.”
“Elfrida brought it, mamma. I suppose it was.”
“Very likely it wasn’t, if she brought it. These Norwegians will be the death of me yet. I’ve no doubt that they made perfectly beautiful vikings—so crude and bloody, you know—but they’re deadly cooks! Edward, don’t you think you ought to do something, or say something? It’s so unscriptural.”
“What—the Norwegian?”
His wife stared at him in exasperation.
“You know perfectly what I mean. It’s shocking, the way people act. You really ought to talk to Diane.”
“Or to Faunce,” retorted the dean dryly. “Very likely he’s to blame.”
“Oh, no!” Fanny’s cry was so sharp that both parents looked at her, amazed, and she blushed painfully. “He was so much in love with Diane,” she faltered. “He told me so. We used to talk about her, and I know how he feels. He couldn’t—he simply couldn’t mean to quarrel with her!”
“So that’s what you were talking about, was it?” her father said in a relieved tone. “I sometimes thought, Fan, that he was trying to flirt with you at the same time that he was making love to Diane.”
“Oh, no!”