“It is to me.”
After a moment she looked up at him. “I should think that you wouldn't mind living there if your business was there. I suppose it's being idle in places that makes them dull. I thought it was dull in London. One ought to be glad—oughtn't he?—to live in any place where there's something to do.”
“Well, that isn't the way people usually feel,” said Mavering. “That's the kind of a place most of them fight shy of.”
Alice laughed with an undercurrent of protest, perhaps because she had seen her parents' whole life, so far as she knew it, passed in this sort of struggle. “I mean that I hate my own life because there seems nothing for me to do with it. I like to have people do something.”
“Do you really?” asked Mavering soberly, as if struck by the novelty of the idea.
“Yes!” she said, with exaltation. “If I were a man—”
He burst into a ringing laugh. “Oh no; don't!”
“Why?” she demanded, with provisional indignation.
“Because then there wouldn't be any Miss Pasmer.”
It seemed to Alice that this joking was rather an unwarranted liberty. Again she could not help joining in his light-heartedness; but she checked herself so abruptly, and put on a look so austere, that he was quelled by it.