"What, indeed!" he says, looking down on me with an amused laughter in his eyes.
"Are you coming, Vasher?" calls Fane; and he goes with the rest.
The girls they leave behind them stand at the door and look after them, and, when the last pair of legs has vanished, turn and look at one another with somewhat lack lustre eyes. Eight women left to each other's society for a whole day! Well may we look dull. I want to get Alice and Milly to myself for a bit, but how about these others? Silvia speaks first. No fear of her putting up with a morning with her own sex. She is going to write letters in her room, she says, if Mrs. Luttrell does not mind. Mrs. Luttrell does not mind, and she goes away. The Listers are going to spend the morning in the garden, if Mrs. Luttrell pleases, so they vanish likewise. Mesdames Fleming and Lister are still in bed, their morning toilettes being affairs of some importance, so we are free of all incumbrances, and able to follow our own devices. Having worshipped the babies on our knees for a full hour, we go into Milly's boudoir.
"Only to think," I say, executing a pirouette on the tips of my toes, "that we three should be all together again here, and that there is no one to send us to bed, or call us names, or insist on our talking!"
"Is he as bad as ever?" asks Milly.
"He is worse!" I say with conviction. "When a person has got into a habit of making himself and everybody round him miserable, he does not stand still—he goes on improving. By the time he is sixty I cannot imagine what he will be!"
"Marry!" says Alice, encouragingly; "that is the only thing a spinster can do in self-defence!"
"You have been so lucky!" I say; "but how do you know I
