“It’s hideous! It’s so red. I hate that color.”
He always saw color in music and heard music in color, and never knew that he was different from other people until he went to school, and there the boys teased him out of it. Think of the individual oddnesses that are strangled (for better or for worse) in school! Limbo must be full of childish conceits and strange gleams of knowledge.
On that particular afternoon the two of them amused their grandmother even more than usual. They had no secrets from Madame Claire, which of course is the greatest compliment the young can pay to the old.
The subject of Judy’s spinsterhood was introduced by her brother. She had refused a friend of his a week before, and he pretended that the situation seriously alarmed him.
“There’s not a man on the tapis at present,” he told Madame Claire. “She’s given poor old Pat Enderby his walking papers, and I’m hanged if I know what she’s going to do now. There isn’t even a nibble that I’m aware of.”
“My dear boy,” said Judy from the other end of the sofa, “I’ve got till I’m thirty-five. That’s nearly eight years. If I don’t find somebody by that time, I’ll know I’m not intended for matrimony.”
“Every woman is intended for matrimony,” said her brother judicially.
“That’s nonsense. And anyway,” Judy defended herself, “I’ve no intention of rushing about looking for a husband. I’m quite content to stay single as long as I have you.”
“Rot,” said Noel unfeelingly. “I want a lot of nephews and nieces, and Gordon’s would be such awful prigs.”
“So might mine be,” she retorted. “There’s no telling, apparently. Who’d think that Mother was Madame Claire’s daughter?”