“She has had plenty of admirers, then?”
He coloured a little and looked away. “Oh, well! hang it all, who am I that I should hang out a blue ribbon?—no, that’s teetotal, isn’t it?—well, you know what I mean. But we’re both going to stick to one another in future.”
“But you haven’t told me yet why you wanted to marry her?”
He ruminatively twisted his small, fair moustache. “Well, I don’t know. She didn’t feel for me the way she felt for the other fellows, she said. Of course, they’re an awful set, though I haven’t told her so yet. And”—he got up and fidgeted with a photograph-frame, it contained a portrait of Colin Paton—“she’s a queer little person, Fay. She’s twenty-two and she says—she says it’s time she became a mother, and she wants—the father—to be a gentleman. I daresay she’d—she’d have had it the other way—things like that don’t matter so much to them—only, of course, I couldn’t. You see that, don’t you, old girl?”
Claudia’s voice was very tender and affectionate as she answered:
“Run away now, old boy, and let me get up. Yes, you couldn’t, of course, and I’ll do my best to smooth things over. Scribble down her address on that memorandum-tablet, will you?”
He came over to her and gave her a bear-like hug.
“You’re a brick, Claudia. I always knew it.... I say, you haven’t been looking the thing lately. Are you quite happy yourself?”
She unloosened a strand of hair from his coat-button with a little wince.
“Well, at any rate I married for love. And is anybody quite happy? I guess life is rather like those bottles of mixed sweets we used to have in the nursery. They were all called ‘sweets,’ but some of them were very sharp and acid, do you remember? We used to first dig out the sugary ones, but nurse afterwards insisted that we should eat the acid ones. Life is a thing of spots and streaks, Jack; that’s all there is to it.”