“Oh, because quarrelling is such a nuisance, and it is so seldom worth making it up again, that I always eschew the acquaintance of the belligerent party, you know,” she says flippantly.
At this moment she is not only indifferent to, but she detests the very vision of the position and wealth Lady Beranger has put before her in such glowing terms, and which the “impressionable fool” beside her has it in his power to offer. Gabrielle’s heart—if what she has of heart is worthy of the name—is being sorely lacerated by the absence of the only face she loves to look upon, and she recollects fiercely that her sister’s grey eyes can gaze their fill on it, while her own glaring black ones are denied.
So she clenches her small fist and in her Bohemian fashion swears inwardly at the cruelty of fate that divides her from Lord Delaval, and barely hears the words of this evidently struck “sixteenth baronet.”
“But why should you make that a rule?” he persists.
He is not given to talking, but to-night he seems positively garrulous.
“Beatrice is a most delicious creature, why should you repudiate being like her, Miss Beranger?”
“Because I have no fancy for a Benedick.”
“Would you like to be Katherine, then? Is there a Petruchio living at whose bidding you could grow tame?”
Is there? she knows there is, and a bright flush suffuses her face while she acknowledges to herself that at his bidding she would be the veriest slave that ever trod the earth, and she answers all the more impetuously, with her eyes flashing.
“No! no! no! a hundred times no,” and Sir Everard cannot doubt that she answers truly.