‘Fie, sir! fie!’ she exclaimed, as he returned; ‘that is too bad!’
‘For my part, I would shut up all members of your sex after forty,’ said he, rather recklessly.
‘Indeed?’ said Mrs. Somerville, struggling with her smile. She was forty-seven.
‘I meant sixty, ma’am—sixty, of course,’ gasped Barclay, with incredible maladroitness.
‘That would be very sad for some of our friends,’ she observed, recovering stoutly from the double blow and looking with great presence of mind at Lady Eliza. ‘How old would you take her ladyship to be, for instance?’
Barclay happened to know that Lady Eliza would, if she lived, keep her fifty-third birthday in a few months; it was a fact of which some previous legal business had made him aware.
‘I should place her at forty-eight,’ he replied, ‘though, of course, if she understood the art of dress as you do, she might look nearly as young as yourself.’
‘Go away; you are too foolish, Barclay! Mr. Turner, we are talking of age: at what age do gentlemen learn wisdom?’
‘Never, very often,’ replied Turner, who, in spite of his tenor voice, had a sour nature.
Barclay gave him a vicious glance; he did not admire him at the best of times, and the interruption annoyed him. He turned away.