"I think he talks very good English," said Mrs. Carmichael kindly. "We none of us speak enough like books these days."
Mabel Clement who, during the greater part of the evening had been scrutinizing Muriel and Captain Wright with a view to working them into her new satire, "The Man-Eater," came out of a frowning wilderness of thought, wherein the others had completely forgotten her, to say that the ideal language, as yet unborn, should consist merely of a riot of sound, expressing the emotion it was required to convey.
"Our spelling is execrable, our grammar clumsy, and the elegant diction of the one-time popular novelist of the Jane Austen calibre was affected in the extreme. Life is too short for these chains of superfluous sentences, and far too short for us to master all the tongues of Babel before we can test the mentality of other nations. It should be possible to invent a tongue, common to all, conveying to the brain, by sound, what it is desired to express."
"Let's begin to invent it now," Muriel suggested rapturously: "Colonel Maddock! Whu-u! Why! Whu-u-u! Isn't my meaning perfectly clear?" She tilted her flower-face up to his, drawing in her breath in a series of staccato jerks.
The Colonel grinned down amiably as he inhaled the fragrance of a delicate hair-wash.
"I know!" Captain Wright bawled triumphantly from his corner: "she wants a drink!"
In the storm of merriment which followed, Mabel Clement smiling resignedly, retired again into the fastness of her soul, while Cyprian crossed the room to a tray containing, Eastern fashion, several long bottles and a syphon.
While the party were breaking up in a fizzling glitter of glasses, Mrs. Carmichael drew close and gently touched his sleeve. Then and there the memories were blotted out of occasions when he had wondered how a clever man like Carmichael stood her! Madonna-sweet, her smile at that moment.
"Wait a bit after the others leave," she said in an undertone; "Robin and I have been wondering about your plans. And I want to consult you over Ferlie's school."
The note on which the last word was spoken broke in two. When she and her husband returned to Burma they would be minus encumbrances. Subtly conveying her own need of a little sympathy in the only idiom she knew, Mrs. Carmichael remained unaware that in so doing she represented to Cyprian the beauty of the Essentially Feminine.