“Snap away! There will be plenty left when you have done,” replies Lavinia, playfully passing her fore finger down the ridge of a very handsome feature. Then, with an immediate return to gravity, “I know that she came back in a very exalté state from that ‘send off.’ She managed to get an introduction to him—to the General, I mean—didn’t she?”
Miss Prince’s mother shakes her head. “No; she had no introduction. Lady de Jones, with whom we went, did not know him; but we had tickets. We were admitted to the platform. Before I guessed what she—Féo, I mean—was going to do, she pushed her way up to him—to where he was standing with his staff, and gave him a bunch of violets.”
“Yes, I remember she told me”—trying honestly to keep out of her voice the disgusted disapprobation that the action thus recalled had inspired in her.
“He bowed and smiled, and took them. What else could he, could any gentleman, do? And we came away, and she was in the seventh heaven; and we both thought—her father and I both thought—would not you have thought?—that there was an end of it!”
“Yes, I should.”
The bareness of this assent is due to the difficulty experienced by the speaker in refraining from expressing how incredible and “beyond all whooping” it appears to her, that to such a transaction there should have been a beginning.
“She has always been rather a ‘handful,’” goes on the mother, with rueful dispassionateness—“determined to be unconventional and unlike other people, and all that sort of stuff; but it never entered our heads that she would be so lost to all decency, to all self-respect, as to do this!—throwing herself at him like a woman in Regent Street; for that is what it comes to.”
The poor lady has worked herself up into a whirlwind of tears and sobs, which her young friend charitably hopes may relieve her.
“And you neither of you had the least suspicion?”
“Not the very least mite,” replied Mrs. Prince, who, though in everyday life almost quite ladylike, is apt, under the pressure of high emotion, to lapse into homely phrases that smack of her unregenerate state before the world-wide success of “Prince’s Dropless Candle,” the Féodorovna, had lifted her into affluence and the habit of wearing her h’s every day. “She has always had a very large correspondence”—with an accent that tells of murdered pride in the fact recorded—“writing to and receiving letters from people that neither her father nor I ever heard of! It was an understood thing that we should ask no questions. I should as soon have thought of flying in the air as saying to her, ‘Whom have you heard from?’”