"You're quite too killing, Owen!"
She laughed tunelessly, clanking her precious pebbles.
"Of course, we all know you're fearfully swanky about your wife's beauty. I saw her yesterday at Lord's—sitting under the awning on the sunny side, with the Duchess of Broads and Lady Castleclare. Your boy was with them, jumping out of his skin over Naumann's bowling for Oxford. Really marvellous! Your poor dear Cambridge hadn't a chance! Tremendously like you he grows—I mean Bawne. Really, your very image!"
"I should prefer," said Saxham, stiffly, "that my son resembled his mother."
"Ha, ha, ha! How quite too romantic!" She threw back her head, its henna-dyed hair plastered closely about it and fastened with buckles of jade, set with knobs of turquoise. A kind of stove-pipe of enamel green velvet crowning her, was trimmed with a band of miniature silk roses in addition to the towering violet plume. The plume, carefully dishevelled so as to convey the impression of a recent wetting, threatened the electric globe-lamp springing from a standard near. Her crossed legs liberally revealed her stockings of white silk openwork, patterned with extra-sized dragon-flies in black chenille, and her laugh rattled about Saxham's vexed ears like Harlequin's painted bladder, full of little pebbles or dried peas. "In love with your wife—and after fourteen years and six weeks!" Her fleshy shoulders shook, and her opulent bosom heaved stormily. She passed a little filmy perfumed handkerchief under her violet gauze veil and delicately dabbed the corners of her eyes. "You remind me of my poor David. I was always the one woman on earth, in his opinion. To the last, he was jealous of the slightest reference to you!"
"To me? Why should he have been?"
Mildred—for this was Saxham's faithless bride-elect of more than twenty years previously—swallowed her wrath with an effort, and went on with the mulish obstinacy of her type:
"Perhaps it was absurd. But men in love are unreasonable creatures, and David was perfectly mad where I was concerned. He worshipped me to the point of idolatry! He never could quite believe that I did not regret my—my choice—that my heart did not sometimes escape from his keeping in dreams, and become yours again, Owen! He never really cared for Patrine, because she has a look of you.... Absurd, considering that she was born two years after you disappeared into South Africa.... Though of course I could not truthfully say that I did not—think of you a great deal!"
It seemed to the silent man who heard, that Mildred offended against decency. His soul loathed her. She went on:
"Her brother—my darling boy who died—was the very image of David!" Her tone was even womanly and tender in speaking of the dead boy. "But Patrine—a year younger—Patrine is really wonderfully like you, with her commanding figure and almost Egyptian profile, those long eyes under straight eyebrows—and all those masses of dead-black hair!" As Saxham writhed under the category she gave out her irritating laugh again. "Ah!—I forgot! When Patrine was in Paris with Lady Beauvayse for the Big Week—Lady Beau took her to the Atelier Wiber—the famous hairdresser's establishment at 000, Rue de la Paix—where they specialise in Chevelures des Teintes Moderne—all the newest effects displayed by stylish mannequins—and really the change is astonishing—her sister Irma and I hardly knew Patrine when she came to see us at Kensington—looking superb, with hair—one might almost call it terra-cotta coloured—showing up her creamy-white skin."