“Zai, mamma!” she says innocently, “she is waltzing with Lord Delaval I think.”
It is a deliberate falsehood, but it comes quite glibly from the child-like lips, and Baby, though she is only seventeen, has almost forgotten to blush when she does wrong.
“Gabrielle is with Lord Delaval,” Lady Beranger snaps crossly. “She is not one to let the grass grow under her feet if she has an object in view.”
“What object has Gabrielle to gain, mamma?” As if Baby didn’t know! As if she had not slipped in of a night, with bare, noiseless feet, and a white wrapper, making her look like a delicious little ghost, behind the screen in her sister’s room, and heard Gabrielle tell Zai that she fully intends being Countess of Delaval in spite of Lady Beranger’s circumventions! But though Baby is only seventeen she takes in her mother, who flashes sotto voce:
“What object has Gabrielle? Why to make the best match in town. I don’t believe that girl would stickle at anything.”
Gabrielle’s propensities to go ahead in everything are not interesting to Baby, who has quite a multitude of affaires du cœur of her own, so she agrees with her mother by a mournful shake of her curly head, and is speedily engrossed with a young German attaché, who, deluded by the apparent wealth of the host, thinks the youngest Honble. Miss Beranger will be a prize worth gaining.
Once more Lady Beranger breaks in on the preliminaries of this Anglo-Prussian alliance.
“Where’s Trixy?” she asks.
“Gone off to bed. She said she was ill, but I think she was angry because Carlton Conway forgot his dance.”
“Why did he forget his dance with her?” Lady Beranger mutters sternly, with hydra-headed suspicion gnawing her mind.