Mrs. Mussard breathed quickly. Never before had she realized what perils environ the young of the opposite sex, even with the chaste environment of school bounds. In her agitation she laid her hand on Valcourt’s shoulder. “I hope—you do not fancy yourself in love with her,” she uttered anxiously.
“Not much catch!” said Valcourt, with the composure of forty. “I got over that in my second year.”
“Silly boy!” Mrs. Mussard very gently smoothed down a lock at the back of his head, which erected itself in silky defiance above its fellows. “When love comes to you, Valcourt,” she went on, with a vivid recollection of the utterances of the inspired authoress of The Bride’s Babble Book, “you will find out what it really means. It is a great mystery, my dear boy, a sacred and solemn unveiling of the heart——”
She stopped, for Valcourt had turned his face up toward hers, gently smiling, and revealing two neat rows of milky white teeth. His tourmaline eyes had an odd expression.
“Did you speak, dear?” his fair Gamaliel asked. For the impression upon her was that he had uttered two words, and that they were, “Hooky’s sister!”
But Valcourt shook his head. “I was only thinking. A fellow like me ... has got to take what comes ... the best he can get ... and the better it is, so much the better for him, don’t you see? If he don’t like what he gets, he doesn’t go about grousing. He generally pretends he’s suited; and she pretends; and they get into a groove—or they get into the newspapers,” said Geraldine’s unworldly babe. “Beastly bad form to get into the newspapers. I never mean to.”
Mrs. Mussard listened breathlessly.
“I shall have a rattling time,” said Valcourt, in his soft, cooing voice, “till Hooky’s sister grows up, and mother presents her, and then I shall marry her, I suppose.”
“Dearest boy, I hope not!” exclaimed Mrs. Mussard. “Someone more suitable must be found,” she continued, rapidly putting all the moneyed girls of her acquaintance through a mental review. “Why should you not marry beauty and birth as well as a banking account? The three things are sometimes associated.”
“German princes pick up girls of that kind,” said Valcourt, his elbows upon his knees, and his round young chin cupped in his hands, “and Austrian archdukes. But why need it be a girl?” he went on, pressing up the smooth young skin at his temples with his finger-tips, so as to produce the effect of premature crows’-feet. “I don’t like girls—all red wrists and flat waists. Why shouldn’t it be a woman, say a dozen years older—an awfully pretty woman, rich, and in the best set, who’d show me the ropes? I’m a jolly ass in some things. I shall come no end of croppers when I go into society, unless there’s somebody to give me the needful tip.”