"How old is she?"
"I don't know exactly."
"But since you have known her since she was three years old?"
"If I began to count years at my time of life," said I, "I should die of fright."
"She looks about thirty. Wouldn't you say so, Horace? It is droll that she has not married. Why?"
"Before the war she was a great traveller. She has been by herself all over the world in all sorts of places among wild tribes and savages. She has been far too busy to think of marriage."
Elodie looked incredulous. "One has always one's moments perdus."
"One doesn't marry in odd moments," said I.
"You and Horace are old bachelors who know nothing at all about it. Tell me. Is she very rich?"
"None of our old families are very rich nowadays," I replied, rather at a loss to account, save on the score of feminine curiosity, for this examination. If it had not been for her mother who left her a small fortune of a thousand or so a year, Auriol would have been as penniless as her two married sisters. Her brother, Lord Vintrey, once a wastrel subaltern of Household Cavalry, and, after a dashing, redeeming war record, now an expensive Lieutenant-Colonel, ate up all the ready money that Lord Mountshire could screw out of his estates. With Elodie I could not enter into these explanations.