“It does not usually come down very heavily upon a pretty woman.”
“Who says that she is pretty?”—with a touch of quickness.
“I thought you did, or Felicity—or—some one.”
“I do not think that there is any allusion to her personal appearance. Now, what has become of my spectacles?”—embarking on that exasperating chronic chase which becomes in time the only species of sport left open to the elderly.
“I believe that you can see perfectly well without them,” rejoined he, always irritated by anything that emphasized the fifteen years of disparity in age between them. “What was the use of my giving you those tortoise-shell eyeglasses, if you never use them?”
“Silly, affected things!” replied she, ungraciously, yet with a something of contradictory kindness in her eye; and at the same moment discovering her missing spectacles, unaccountably astride upon her own high well-bared brow, she searched for, found, and read aloud the following sentences—
“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome?’”
“Was that the woman who drank eye-wash and methylated spirit if she could not get anything else to quench her thirst?”
“She did it once too often. Do not interrupt again.
“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago.’”