"Que voulez-vous, cher enfant?" answered Steph without the least trace of temper. "You introduce me to no society; you scarcely ever take me anywhere; four or five times a week you don't get home till past midnight--this morning it was three o'clock when you crept upstairs as quietly as a burglar. What would you have?"
George Crofton moved uneasily in his chair, but did not reply. "Besides," resumed his wife, "it was only dear old Euphrosyne Smith who came to see me. She looks eighteen when she is on the corde, but she's thirty-four if she's a day. I've known her for five years, and many a little kindness she has done me. And then, although, of course, I shall never want to go back to the old life, I must say that I like to hear about it now and again and to know how everybody is getting on. Can you wonder at it, now that you leave me so much alone?"
"For all that, Steph, I wish you would break off the connection." Then, after a pause: "I know that of late I have seemed to neglect you a little; but if I have done so, it has been as much for your sake as my own."
"Ah, yes, I know: cards, cards, always cards."
"What would you have?--as a certain person sometimes says. I know a little about cards; I know nothing about anything else that will bring grist to the mill. I bought my experience in the dearest of all schools, and if I try to profit by it, who shall blame me?"
"Which means, that you are teaching others to buy their experience in the same way."
"Why not?" he answered with a laugh. "It is a law of the universe that one set of creatures shall prey on another. I was very nice picking for the kites once on a time; now I am a kite myself. The law of metempsychosis in such cases is a very curious one."
"I don't know what you mean when you make use of such outlandish words," said Stephanie with a pout.
"So much the better; learned women are an abomination."
At this juncture a servant brought in the morning papers. Crofton seized one of them, a sporting journal, and pushed the other across the table. He was deep in the mysteries of the latest odds, when a low cry from his wife caused him to glance sharply at her. "What's up now, Steph?" he asked. "It would be a libel to say you had touched the rouge-pot this morning, because there isn't a bit of colour in your cheeks."