“Oh no!” said Lady Stratclyffe, looking up from her work. “How could you possibly imagine that?”
“English ladies are all so brave, nowadays!” he returned, with an inflection of sarcasm.
Said a velvet voice behind him, with a sweet foreign accent that added honey to the implied compliment:
“Milord, the English ladies but follow the example of the English gentlemen!”
“Capital, Madame de Roux!” called out a handsome gray-haired man, rather formally and stiffly dressed for a yacht-party, who had been conversing with a French officer in Zouave uniform. “You scatter your sugar-plums broadcast!—even a diplomatist may hope to pick up one in the scramble.... Now, if you had said ‘The English Army,’—Lord Cardillon would have taken the compliment to himself!”
Cardillon returned, ignoring the prick of sarcasm:
“Madame de Roux, who is upon her way to the Crimea, to confer supreme happiness upon a gallant countryman, can afford to give English ladies due credit for bravery. When do you sail, Madame?”
She thought in two days’ time.... He said, with gallant regret:
“I wish I might have had the pleasure of carrying you there in the Foam Star. But I am compelled to return to England, worse luck!”
She said, with her lovely smile, as Lord Stratclyffe was buttonholed by a gray-whiskered bluff-faced Rear-Admiral: