"His very words! Men are wonderfully unoriginal. I just leant forward and kissed him on his eyelids—it's all right!" she exclaimed; "he insists that we're morally engaged—and whenever I do that he simply crumples up. It's rude to look quite so surprised, George."
"And yet your people are quite respectable," I said thoughtfully.
She shook her head and sighed.
"You've become dreadfully proper and old-fashioned, George," she told me, "since you got into this musty old House. You're almost as bad as David, without the excuse of caring a snap of the fingers for me. He lectured me and lectured me, but when it was over he wanted to dash away and spend his life in a moorland cottage with me, sins and all."
"That temptation, at least, you had the fortitude to resist," I said.
She wrinkled her nose and pouted. "Me no likee. There are such millions of things I simply can't do without, and David can't give them me, and if he could he wouldn't. He is so serious, poor lamb! And it's always about the wrong things. After all, George, what does matter in life? It's frightfully serious to be ugly, or grow old, or not to know how to dress—I'm all right there at present, and perhaps I shan't mind when the time comes and I get all skinny and lined. It'll be frightfully serious if Lady Knightrider doesn't ask me up for the Northern Meeting, or if Daddy doesn't raise my allowance—I told you I was broke, didn't I? Well, I am. In the meantime——" She broke off and hummed two bars of a waltz. "Life is good, George."
"We were discussing Raney," I reminded her.
"Were we? I'd forgotten about him."
"It is an old habit of yours. What part does he play in your tragedy?"
"Tragedy?" she echoed, not altogether displeased at the choice of word.