“Anything wrong?”
“Everything’s wrong. I’ve just been having tea with Bill and his Mabel.”
“Oh, ah!” said Archie, interested. “And what’s the verdict?”
“Guilty!” said Lucille. “And the sentence, if I had anything to do with it, would be transportation for life.” She peeled off her gloves irritably. “What fools men are! Not you, precious! You’re the only man in the world that isn’t, it seems to me. You did marry a nice girl, didn’t you? You didn’t go running round after females with crimson hair, goggling at them with your eyes popping out of your head like a bulldog waiting for a bone.”
“Oh, I say! Does old Bill look like that?”
“Worse!”
Archie rose to a point of order.
“But one moment, old lady. You speak of crimson hair. Surely old Bill—in the extremely jolly monologues he used to deliver whenever I didn’t see him coming and he got me alone—used to allude to her hair as brown.”
“It isn’t brown now. It’s bright scarlet. Good gracious, I ought to know. I’ve been looking at it all the afternoon. It dazzled me. If I’ve got to meet her again, I mean to go to the oculist’s and get a pair of those smoked glasses you wear at Palm Beach.” Lucille brooded silently for a while over the tragedy. “I don’t want to say anything against her, of course.”
“No, no, of course not.”