'No?' said Maud, quite unconvinced, and feeling vexed at Felicia's evident dislike for her companion. 'Well, he's a great friend of mine, so don't abuse him, please.'
'Nonsense, child!' cried Felicia, in a fright. 'You don't know him in the least, or you would not say that. To begin with, he is not quite a gentleman, you know.'
'Not a gentleman!' cried Maud, aghast, 'he seems to me a very fine one.'
'As fine as you please,' said Felicia, 'but not a thorough gentleman. Gentlemen never say things that hurt you or offend your taste. Now with Mr. Desvœux I feel for ever in a fright lest he should say something I dislike; and I know he thinks things that I dislike.'
'I think you are prejudiced, Felicia. What he says seems to me all very nice.'
'Perhaps it is prejudice,' Felicia answered, 'but I think it all the same. I feel the difference with other people; Major Sutton, for instance.'
'He is your ideal, is he not?' cried Maud, blushing and laughing, for somehow she was beginning to feel that Felicia had designs upon her.
'Yes,' Felicia said in her fervent way; 'he is pure and true and chivalrous to the core: he seems to me made of quite other stuff from men like Mr. Desvœux.'
'He is all made of solid gold,' cried Maud, by this time in a teasing mood, 'and Mr. Desvœux is plaster-of-Paris and putty and pinchbeck, and everything that is horrid. But he is very amusing, dearest Felicia, all the same, and very nice. I will not drive with him any more, of course, if you do not like it.'
Thereupon Maud, in a somewhat rebellious frame of mind, was about to go and take her things off, and was already half-way through the doorway when she turned round and saw Felicia's sweet, serene, refined brow wearing a look of harassment and annoyance, and a sudden pang of remorse struck her that she should, in pure mischief, have been wounding a tender heart and endangering a friendship, compared with which she felt everything else in the world was but a straw in the balance. She rushed back and flung her arms round her companion's neck. 'Dearest Felicia,' she said, 'you know that I would fly to the moon rather than do anything you did not like or make you love me the tiniest atom less. I want to tell you something. You think, I know, that I am falling in love with Mr. Desvœux. Well, dear, I don't care for him that!'