"Doesn't it all depend," said Tressady, "on whether he happens to be able to make it disagreeable for you in return?"
"That's just it," said Betty Leven, eagerly. "I agree with Frank—it's all so stupid, this 'loving' everybody. It makes one positively hot. We sit under a clergyman, Frank and I, who talks of nothing every Sunday but love—love—like that, long-drawn-out—how our politics should be 'love,' and our shopping should be 'love'—till we long simply to bastinado somebody. I want to have a little real nice cruelty—something sharp and interesting. I should like to stick pins into my maid, only unfortunately, as she has more than once pointed out to me, it would be so much easier for her to stick them into me!"
"You want the time of Miss Austen's novels back again," said young Bayle, stooping to her, with his measured and agreeable smile—"before even the clergy had a mission."
"Ah! but it would be no good," said Lady Leven, sighing, "if she were there!"
She threw out her small hand towards her hostess, and everybody laughed.
Up to the moment of the laugh, Lady Maxwell had been lying back in her chair listening, the beautiful mouth absently merry, and the eyes speaking—Tressady thought—of quite other things, of some hidden converse of her own, going on in the brain behind the eyes. A certain prophetess-air seemed natural to her. Nevertheless, that first impression of her he had carried away from the hospital scene was being somehow blurred and broken up.
She joined in the laugh against herself; then, with a little nod towards her assailant, she said to Edward Watton, who was sitting on her right hand. "You're not taken in, I know."
"Oh, if you mean that I go in for 'cases' and 'causes' too," cried Lady Leven, interrupting, "of course I do—I can't be left alone. I must dance as my generation pipes."
"Which means," said her husband, drily, "that she went for two days filling soda-water bottles the week before last, and a day's shirt-making last week. From the first, I was told that she would probably return to me with an eye knocked out, she being totally inexperienced and absurdly rash. As to the second, to judge from the description she gave me of the den she had been sitting in when she came home, and the headache she had next day, I still expect typhoid. The fortnight isn't up till Wednesday."
There was a shout of mingled laughter and inquiry.