“I shall be glad to have her. But I don’t quite see why I am to kill the fatted calf. She won’t act in the least like a prodigal.”
“Why should you care how she acts? You want her back. Isn’t that enough?”
He liked her crisp common sense. Her fearless expression of opinion. Most of the women he knew were afraid not to agree with him. That was the trouble with Adelaide. She leaned to him always like a lily, charming, feminine, soft as milk. But Jane did not lean. She was, he told himself, a cup of elixir held to his lips. He drank as it were of her youth.
They finished their coffee and he smoked a cigar. Edith and Baldy telephoned that the thing was more serious than they had anticipated. That perhaps he had better send Briggs.
“So that means I’m going to have you to myself for an hour longer,” Frederick told Jane. “I hope you are as happy in the prospect as I am.”
“I am having a joyous time. I feel like Cinderella at the ball.”
He laughed at that. “You’re a refreshing child, Jane.” He had never before called her by her first name.
“Am I? But I’m not a child. I’m as old as the hills.”
“Not in years.”
“In wisdom. I know how to make ends meet, and how to order meals, and how to plan my own dresses, and a lot of things that your Edith doesn’t have to think about.”