"Can't say, really; I'm too used to them to judge. I can't make love to them, so I never took the trouble to criticise them; but we've always been a good-looking race, I believe. I tell you who's staying there—that girl we met in Toronto. Do you remember her—Cecil St. Aubyn?"
"I should say I did. How did she get here?"
"She's come to live with her aunt, Mrs. Coverdale. You know that over-dressed widow who lives in Hyde Park gardens, and, when she can't afford Brighton, shuts the front shutters, lives in the back drawing-room, and says, 'Not at home to callers?' St. Aubyn is as poor as a rat, so I suppose he was glad to send Cecil here; and the Coverdale likes to have somebody who'll draw men to her parties, which I'm sure her champagne will never do. It's the most unblushing gooseberry ever ticketed 'Veuve Clicquot.'"
"'Pon my life, I'm delighted to hear it," said I. "The St. Aubyn's superb eyes will make the gooseberry go down. Men in Canada would have swallowed cask-washings to get a single waltz with her. All Toronto went mad on that score. You admired her, too, old fellow, only you weren't with her long enough for such a stoic as you are to boil up into anything warmer."
"Oh yes, I thought her extremely pretty, but I thought her a little flirt, nevertheless."
"Stuff! An attractive girl can't make herself ugly or disagreeable, or erect a brick wall round herself, with iron spikes on the top, for fear, through looking at her, any fellow might come to grief. The men followed her, and she couldn't help that."
"And she encouraged them, and she could help that. However, I don't wish to speak against her; it's nothing to me how she kills and slays, provided I'm not among the bag. Take care you don't get shot yourself, Ned."
"Keep your counsel for your own use, Syd. You put me in mind of the philanthropist, who ran to warn his neighbor of the dangers of soot while his own chimney was on fire."
"As how? I don't quite see the point of your parable," said Vivian, with an expression of such innocent impassiveness that one would have thought he had never seen her fair face out of her furs in her sledge, or admired her small ankles when she was skating on the Ontario.
The winter before, a brother of mine, who was out there in the Rifles, wrote and asked me to go and have some buffalo-hunting, and Vivian went out with me for a couple of months. We had some very good sport in the western woods and plains, and his elk and bison horns are still stuck up in Vivian's rooms at Uxbridge, with many another trophy of both hemispheres. We had sport of another kind, too, to the merry music of the silvery sledge-bells, over the crisp snow and the gleaming ice, while bright eyes shone on us under delicate lace veils, and little feet peeped from under heaps of sable and bearskin, and gay voices rang out in would-be fear when the horses shied at the shadow of themselves, or at the moon shining on the ice. Who thinks of Canada without in fancy hearing the ringing chimes of the gay sledge bells swinging joyous measure into the clear sunshine or the white moonlight, in tune with light laughter, and soft whispers, and careless hearts?