“Hasn’t he any prospects?”
“None whatever—at least none that are called prospects in our set, though I expect they’d sound pretty fine to anyone else. He’ll have Cock Marling when his father dies.”
“You shouldn’t have fallen in love with a landed proprietor, Jen.”
“Oh, well, it’s done now and I can’t help it.”
“You don’t sound infatuated.”
“I’m not, but I’m in love right enough. It’s all the hanging about and uncertainty that makes me sound bored—in self-defence one has to grow a thick skin.”
Mary did not speak for a moment but seemed to slip through the firelight into a dream.
“Yes,” she said at last—“a thick skin or a hard heart. If the average woman’s heart could be looked at under a microscope I expect it would be seen to be covered with little spikes and scales and callouses—a regular hard heart. Or perhaps it would be inflamed and tender ... I believe inflammation is a defence, against disease—or poison. But after all, nothing’s much good—the enemy always gets his knife in somehow.”
She turned away her eyes from Jenny, and the younger sister felt abashed—and just because she was abashed and awkward and shy, for that very reason, she blurted out——
“How’s Julian?”