‘I like Oxford,’ she added after a short pause, ‘I can say what I like without everybody thinking I mean something else. That’s sometimes so unpleasant. I wonder,’ she remarked musingly, ‘who I’m going to marry; what sort of person do you think would suit me, Mr. Cochrane?’
‘I should put you down for a Sir William Shipton or something like that, Miss Maisie,’ I answered.
‘Oh! the money part of that is all right, but I want a respectable and presentable person, not an aitchless remnant with a squint and large feet.’
‘Oh! I suppose a decent sort of Englishman who bathes daily and plays most games would do you,’ I suggested.
‘Yes I think so, but he must be big and strong to satisfy me.’
‘There are some of them to be found even in these hard times,’ I assented.
‘Thank the Lord,’ said Maisie piously; and we changed the subject.
‘Look,’ she cried suddenly, as a punt containing a portly and painted dowager shot past, propelled by a weedy-looking youth with pince-nez, ‘that’s old Lady Dombonpoint, the widow of Sir Herbert of the celebrated ‘Aurol for Aching Ears.’ She’s as rich as they make them, and yet she only allowed her son, that sickly-looking youth, half-a-crown a week for pocket money at Eton, and bought his clothes from a slop-shop in Tottenham Court Road. But you know,’ she continued in a whisper, although no one was near,—and when Maisie whispers I know what to expect,—‘she was awfully gone on Blitherington last season, and followed him all round the Park, not to speak of country-houses and restaurants; he had a wretched time till she finally proposed to him at Ascot on a coach. Of course he rejected her, and then she fainted. He told me he might have stood her for a year, but he was sure she was what he calls a “stayer,” and would live to a hundred.’ Before I had time to make any comment on this extraordinary episode in the life of the youthful peer, the Bugg’s voice penetrated to our shelter and we caught the words, ‘I told him he was an idiot to oppose the Plural Dean, and no wonder they call it the Church Irritant if he is a curate.’ And the punt containing the inimitable Ophelia passed on. ‘There!’ said Maisie explosively, ‘that’s a nice thing to have tacked on to me, isn’t it? She’s Blithers’ bête noir; why one day she told him that he oughtn’t to smoke, as it produced a weakness in the pneumatic nerve!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry for you, but still you must admit she answers the description that a certain paper bestowed on itself not long ago, “Funny without being vulgar.”’
‘I don’t know,’ said Maisie doubtfully, ‘why I could tell you some things she’s said that—well perhaps I’d better not.’