“Yes,” she says, as if reflecting deeply, “the brougham must be green, a very dark green, and picked out with black, and brass mountings.”
“A little sombre, don’t you think?” he suggests timidly.
“Good heavens, Mr. Stubbs! Do you want me to drive out only on the ninth of November and look as if I was a part of the Lord Mayor’s show?” she asks excitedly, raising her voice and causing him to give a little jump on his chair.
It is the first time she has displayed any variation of feeling, and the spice of devilry in her eyes, though it does away with Mary Anderson, heightens her beauty. Usually Trixy Beranger resembles a large waxen doll, with yellow hair and pink and white cheeks.
But she recovers her temper directly. It strikes her that this glittering fish may prove a slippery one if she allows the stormy side of her character to burst out before the matrimonial noose is tied.
“But, of course, I know you were only joking about the colours for the brougham. I am sure your taste is similar to my own, and that you think nothing can be too quiet to be aristocratic. Mamma rather wants me at four o’clock, have you any idea what the time is?”
He glances once more at the leviathan timekeeper he carries, and discovers that he has outstayed his limit fifteen minutes, and that his regular constitutional before feeding time will have to be curtailed.
“I, too, have numerous letters to write, so I think I’ll say au revoir.”
Trixy sticks out five fingers carelessly, and he takes them in silence, but he is not bold enough to squeeze them ever so little, and he breathes more freely directly he is outside the big drawing-room door.
His broad back turned, Trixy steals out on tip-toe upon the landing, and when he is fairly out of the house, she opens the ivory and ebony box, takes out the two morocco cases, and walking up to the large mirror opposite, she leisurely puts the chain of brilliants and the band of rubies round her snowy throat. Rubies flash in her ears, and a huge bracelet of the same gems gleams blood-red on her rounded arm.