"What? That you were 'less bored?'"
"That I always wish; but I was thinking of Cos, there—milk-posset, as little Eardley in the troop says they called him at Eton—I was wishing he could see Levinge and Castlereagh, just as épouvantails, to make him turn and flee as the French noblesse did when they saw their cousins and brothers strung up à la lanterne."
"Wasn't it very strange," Blanche was saying to me at the same time, "that Cecil never mentioned Sydney? I've so often spoken of him, told her his troop, and all about him. (He has always been so kind to me, though he is eighteen years older—just twice my age.) Besides, I found her one day looking at his picture in the gallery, so she must have known it was the same Colonel Vivian, mustn't she Captain Thornton?"
"I should say so. Have you known her long?"
"No. We met her at Brighton this August with that silly woman, Mrs. Coverdale. All her artifices and falsehoods annoy Cecil so; Cecil doesn't mind saying she's not rich, she knows it's no crime."
"C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute," said I.
"Don't talk in that way," laughed Blanche. "That's bitter and sarcastic, like Sydney in his grand moods, when I'm half afraid of him. I am sure Cecil couldn't be nicer, if she were ever such an heiress. Mamma asked her for Christmas because she once knew Mr. St. Aubyn well, and Cecil is not happy with Mrs. Coverdale. False and true don't suit each other. I hope Sydney will like her—do you think he does?"
That was a question I could not answer. He admired her, of course, because he could not well have helped it, and had done so in Canada; and he was talking to her now, I dare say, to force her to acknowledge that he was more amusing than Horace Cos. But he seemed to me to weigh her in a criticising balance, as if he expected to find her wanting—as if it pleased him to provoke and correct her, as one pricks and curbs a beautiful two-year old, just to see its graceful impatience at the check and the glance of its wild eye.