A streak of sincere amusement stirred the younger woman’s gloom. Poor, dear Flora! she must be forgetting to whom she is talking. Perhaps Flora remembered, for she left the topic.
“You know that I have left Tennington?”
“Yes, I was so sorry.”
“It is more than I was,” replied Flora, dryly. “I never had such a run of bad cards in my life as I had there, and I always detest the country.”
“How can any one who is in their senses like living there?” agreed Bonnybell, fervently, deriving the first advantage she had yet reaped from the lost Edward in the ability to lay aside for ever her rural enthusiasms.
“I shall take a cottage on the river in the summer, and you must come and stay with me, and we will get hold of some of the old set—oh no, not Charlie, of course—some of the right sort.”
It was not easy to Miss Ransome, though she accomplished it—since it pleased Flora, and tied her to nothing—to give an answer to the effect that Heaven seemed to open to her at this prospect. Flora needed some amends for the plain indications she herself had been obliged to give her, that the world’s market-places were not the spots where conferences with her were most to be relished; and, moreover, acquiescence in distant made it easier to evade nearer projects of reunion.
“Cannot you dine quietly with me to-night or some other night? We will get somebody to feed us at the Carlton and take us to hear Suzette at the Empire. I believe she has brought over her Paris répertoire quite unmutilated!”
Bonnybell veiled the terror inspired by this proposition by a little grimace of regret that had something of truth in it. If Lady Tennington could be made invisible and Lady Bletchley’s ears stopped, their protégée would have thoroughly enjoyed listening once again, with the perfect comprehension she did herself the justice to know that she could bring to them, to Suzette’s astonishing audacities. Suzette was canaille before everything; but what a genius!
“Oh, what a treat it would have been for me! and how dear of you to think of it! But it is—as pleasant things generally are for me, nowadays—quite out of the question. I am to spend a ‘Happy Evening.’”