General Fulton looked at her in exasperated admiration as she sat there, quietly warming her toes in front of the fire, meditative and candid; the typical gentle wife who patiently adds up the problems of life for her husband, and leaves his wisdom to unravel the answer.
“Why didn’t you say at the beginning that we were in debt?” he asked.
“I don’t know that we are, dear,” she said, looking at him in perfect innocence. “I only said that I couldn’t manage on what you gave me. I don’t know what your shares come to; it is all Greek to me.”
“Well, have it your own way, damn it,” returned her husband. “Perhaps you’ve inherited business instincts, and they always go with turpitude.”
“I wish you would think a little of the children sometimes,” she said, glancing at Teresa who sat lost in thought by the window, hearing what they said, and trying in vain to understand what the argument really meant.
“Do you want to go to Millport, Dicky?” her father asked kindly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It is on the sea, isn’t it?”
“It’s on shrimps,” he replied, “and docks—things that open and shut at you—and it is as black as night, and people walk about with bread under their arms. Well, good-bye, dear; your mother says we’re going, and she knows—she cares—God bless her.” He kissed Teresa affectionately, and left the room.
And so, the course of time showed Messrs. Burridge’s pantechnicons casting the contents of Cyril’s happy little home into the ornate cinnamon jaws of a house that he said made him think somehow of the late Prince Albert. “The sort of thing he’d have built for the head gamekeeper, Sue,” he remarked after lunch on their first day there. “And the park is the very thing for ‘interments’; you could see them winding all the way from end to end. I hope it will come up to your expectations in the matter of wealthy consorts for the girls; or is that not part of the scheme?”
“I don’t like joking about marriage, Cyril, you know that,” she replied, “it may mean so much to a girl.” She sighed. She had been very beautiful twenty years before, and would have been so still, but for the fact that years of quiet enjoyment of her own skill in getting what she wanted, and a conscious superiority over people who “worried about what couldn’t be helped” had obliterated the delicate lines of her face, and given to the fleeting dimple, which used to be the despair and delight of her lovers, the coarser appearance of a crease in a satin cushion.