"Well, perhaps I do."
"And I'm sure it must be very hard not to be attentive to you," said Nunthorp, with a rather brutal impersonality; "for I should fancy you have a way—quite unconscious, mind—of giving your current admirer the idea that he's the only one who ever held the office!"
"Thanks," said she, with perfect good-humour; "that's a very pretty way of putting it."
"What, Midge?"
"That I'm a hopeless flirt—which is the root of the whole matter, I suppose!"
She burst out laughing, and he joined her. But there had been a pinch of pathos in her words, and he was weak enough to make a show of contradicting them. She would not listen to him, she laughed at his insincerity. The conversation had broken down, and, as soon as he decently could, he went.
That was at the very end of a season; and Lord Nunthorp did not see his notorious relative again for some months. In the following February, however, he heard her sing at some evening party; he had no chance of talking with her properly; but he was glad to find that he could meet her at a dance the next night.
"Well, Midge!" he was able to say at last, as they sat out together at this dance. "How many proposals since the summer?"
"She gravely held up three fingers."
She gravely held up three fingers. Nunthorp laughed consumedly.
"Any more scalps?" he inquired.
This was an ancient pleasantry. It referred to the expensive presents with which some young men had paved their way to disappointment. It was moot point between Miss Anstruther and her noble kinsman whether she had any right to retain these things. She considered she had every right, and declared that these presents were her only compensation for so many unpleasantnesses. He pretended to take higher ground in the matter. But it amused him a good deal to ask about her "scalps."
