“When you have praised him it has always been in some damning way,” pursues Lavinia, breaking more and more into flame—“saying what a good judge of lace he is, and how well he mended your Bow teapot!”
“So he did.”
“How would you like it, if, when some one asked my opinion of Mr. Darcy as a parish priest, I answered that he did not make bad cabbage-nets?”
Susan smiles reluctantly. “Do not let us quarrel,” she says. “As long as I supply you with eggs, it would be inconvenient to you; and, as for me, why, I might break another teapot!”
* * * * *
“Well, how did she take it?” asks Rupert, who has apparently been waiting the whole time of his betrothed’s absence in contented smoking and musing under the immemorial yews of the churchyard.
“She asked me whether I am marrying you to please myself?” replies Lavinia, lifting eyes in which he notes a trouble that had not clouded them when he parted from her, in an almost doglike wistfulness of appeal to his, “Am I, Rupert?”
“Our friends ask us very indelicate questions,” he answers, turning away.
* * * * *
A day or two later Lavinia has a casual meeting with Mrs. Prince in the road.