“I suppose that I am not imaginative. I wait for my eye and ear to inform me, before I realize things.”
“Your eye?” His judgment disapproved the protest, but the impress of Bonnybell’s beauty upon his brain was too strong and recent for him to be able to help it.
“Oh, I grant you that she is extraordinarily pretty!”—with a reluctant note of pleasure in the fact admitted—“prettier than a person has any business to be!” stamping relentlessly upon that weakness of hers for physical beauty which her husband had always felt to be pathetic. “But what a girl!”
“Fin de siècle?” he asked, snatching at a phrase which in 1901 had lost its significance, but which he hoped expressed enough disapprobation to meet the requirements of the case.
“I never could see why the end of a century should justify immorality more than the beginning; but what a girl! what a plane of thought she moves on! what a moral standpoint!”
The man expressed no dissent. He could not conscientiously take up the cudgels in defence of Miss Ransome’s system of ethics, and to say anything in palliation of it would do her only disservice.
“What a girl! what a milieu! Sir Algernon Skipton! and Mademoiselle Lolotte!—unnamable men and unfortunates!”
This last well seasoned sentence did elicit an “Oh!” but it was as involuntary as the sneeze produced by an over-mustarded devil.
“Well, what else can you call Mademoiselle Lolotte, when she is translated into plain English?”
Edward did not call Mademoiselle Lolotte anything else, though a secret flash of amusement crossed his mind at the application of the homely word to the magnificent monarch of the Parisian Half World, as he had last seen her whizzing past in her motor brougham to Longchamps.