“Don’t make that sort of suggestion, my dear, even in joke. Gerald has helped you; I am not Gerald. You’ve made him dance to your tune through a lot of mud, but you won’t make me. There are enough of the family in this shabby kind of business as it is.”
“Oh, Ronald!——”
“You see, Sourisette,” he added, “you are always telling me that I wear my clothes too long; you’ve often seen me in an old coat, in a shockingly old coat; but you never saw me in an ill-cut one. Well, I like my acquaintances to be like my clothes. They may be out at elbows, but I must have ’em well cut.”
Lady Kenilworth gazed at her pocket-handkerchief for a few minutes in disturbed silence.
“Is that the tone you mean to take about my new people?” she asked at last.
“My dearest Sourisette, I don’t take any tone. These richards from the Northwest are nothing to me. You are taking them up, and getting Carrie to take them up, because you mean to get lots of good things out of them. No one can possibly know ‘a bull-dozing boss’ from North Dakota for any other reason than to plunder him.”
“Oh, Ronald! What coarse and odious things you say!”
Her exclamation was beseeching and indignant; a little flush of color went over her fair cheeks. “You shouldn’t be so hard upon one,” she added. “Some poet has said that poverty gives us strange bed-fellows.”
“We need never lie down on the bed; we can lie in our own straw.”
“But if we have used up all our straw?”