“So that is the Clytie you used to write to me about in Africa?” he said. “No wonder you like having such a splendid thing about the place, as a kind of intermittent fixture.”
“I am so glad you like her,” said Caroline.
“I didn't say I liked her. I don't give myself away so soon as that. But, by Jove! I liked looking at her. Where is she generally to be found?”
“Either here or, if you make yourself very civil to her, she may let you go round to her studio—on her day, you know.”
“Oh, she runs a day, does she? These young women are getting very emancipated.”
“They are,” said George Farquharson, lighting his pipe. “So much the better.”
“I don't know so much about that,” replied Hammerdyke. “If they are too emancipated, they get an idea that their own way is everything in the world, and grow devilish hard in the mouth when the time comes for them to be pulled up.”
“What a contradictory creature!” cried Caroline. “Only yesterday you were railing at the well brought up drawing-room young ladies you were having to take in to dinner.”
“I should think so: the things that draw, recite, and play the fiddle, and rush about to lectures. I am getting a bit too old for that kind of young animal. I'd sooner spend a week with the wife of a camel driver than with any one of them. She would be just as intelligent, somewhat funnier, and the advantage would be that you could lick her into shape without alarming absurd prejudices. No; the drawing-room young lady is distinctly 'off,' just as much as the over-emancipated.”
“Well, what kind of a young woman are you looking out for?”