"Well, I don't understand myself!" said Kitty, shortly, reaching out for a bunch of roses that Margaret had just brought her, and burying her face among them.
"Perhaps, if you submitted the problem to me," said Ashe, laughing, "we might be able to thresh it out together!"
He folded his arms and leaned against the foot of the bed, delighting his eyes with the vision of her amid the folds of muslin and lace, and all the costly refinements of pillow and coverlet with which she liked to surround herself at that hour of the morning. She might have been a French princess of the old regime, receiving her court.
Kitty shook her head. The roses fell idly from her hands, and made bright patches of blush pink about her. Ashe went on:
"Anyway, dear, don't give silly tongues too good a handle!"
He threw her a gay comrade's look, as though to say that they both knew the folly of the world, but he perhaps the better, as he was the elder.
"You mean," said Kitty, calmly, "that I am not to talk so much to Geoffrey Cliffe?"
"Is he worth it?" said Ashe. "That's what I want to know—worth the fuss that some people make?"
"It's the fuss and the people that drive one on," said Kitty, under her breath.
"You flatter them too much, darling! Do you think you were quite kind to me last night?—let's put it that way. I looked a precious fool, you know, standing on those steps, while you were keeping old Mother Parham and the whole show waiting!"