Letty was so staggered by the novelty and iniquity of Farebrother’s perfect willingness to give her up to Sir Archy that she could not recover herself all at once—and the next thing, Sir Archy had tramped through the underbush to them, looking wonderfully handsome and stalwart in his knickerbockers and his glengarry pulled over his eyes.
If Letty found that Farebrother was always joking and difficult to reduce to seriousness, she could find no such fault with Sir Archy. He was the literal and exact Briton, who took everything au sérieux, and whose humor was of the broad and obvious kind that prevails in the tight little island. He was as much puzzled by the status of affairs between Letty and Farebrother as Ethel Maywood was—and could hardly refrain sometimes from classing Letty as a flirt—a word that meant to him everything base and dishonorable in womankind—for a flirt, from his point of view, was a girl with a little money, who led younger sons and rash young officers and helpless curates to believe that she could be persuaded to marry one of them, and ended by hooking a mature baronet, or an elder son, with a good landed property.
Flirtation on the American plan, merely to pass away the time, and with no ulterior object whatever, was altogether incomprehensible to him. And Letty’s perfect self-possession! No tell-tale blush, but a look of the most infantile innocence she wore, when she was caught in the very act of taking a sentimental walk with a man! The genuine American girl—not the imitation Anglo-American formed by transatlantic travel—was a very queer lot, thought Sir Archy, gravely.
“Where have you been?” asked Letty, with an air of authority, which she alternated with the most charming submissiveness.
“At Shrewsbury,” answered Sir Archy.
“Ah, I know—we all know. There’s a magnet at Shrewsbury.”
Now, to be chaffed about a girl, and particularly a girl like Miss Maywood—to whom he had undeniably paid certain attentions, was both novel and unpleasant to Sir Archy, so he only answered stiffly, “I don’t quite understand your allusion.”
“Why, Ethel Maywood, of course!” cried Letty. “Does anybody suppose that you would go so often to see that wicked old man at Shrewsbury? or Mrs. Chessingham and her husband?”
“If you suppose that there is anything more than friendship between Miss Maywood and myself, you are mistaken—and the suspicion would do Miss Maywood great injustice,” said Sir Archy, with dignity.
“Oh, if you think it would hurt Miss Maywood to have it supposed that you are devoted to her—”