That, briefly, was still her attitude towards the ideal. She did not love her husband, but she thought him sufficiently gentlemanlike and pleasing to save herself regret. She did, or rather she had, loved Eustace, but the idea of either of them permitting that past folly to interfere with the present they had deliberately chosen was absurd. To begin with, they would see little of each other, and when they did they would carefully avoid the renewal of any confidential relations; that was the great safety in these cases; for Lady Maud viewed the matter dispassionately, as a case.
She came down to dinner that evening in a pale plush teagown, with long sleeves falling back from her bare arms, and smiled at everything. At the fact that she got on perfectly without Josephine's help; at the furtive way in which Kirsty set down the dinner, as if it were a bomb, and she in a hurry to escape the explosion; at her husband's continued anxiety about the weather; at the professor's profuse apologies for having intruded on them so inopportunely.
"Not at all," she said gaily; "you will make a fourth at whist; Edward loves a rubber."
"I can't play to-night," replied her husband. "I've a headache."
"You do look a little flushed; perhaps it is the wind."
"The wind!" he echoed petulantly; "of course it's the wind. Did you ever hear anything like it, Endorwick? I swear I never slept a wink last night, what with it and that confounded sea. It is enough to drive a fellow distracted."
"You are as bad as Josephine," laughed his wife. "She has been in hysterics all day until Miss Macdonald's cook gave her a whole tumbler of hot whiskey and water. Since then she has been asleep."
"We have all been trying that remedy," put in Eustace. "What with the men coming in, and the boats being engaged, we shall want more whiskey to-morrow, Wilson."
"No, we shan't," retorted his host quickly; "I mean it's beastly stuff, you know. I never take anything but claret myself."
"Awfully difficult to get decent claret nowadays," remarked Eustace with the ease, to him so delightfully new, of the rich man who quarrels with the supply and not the price. So the topic passed.
"I'll have a cigar and go to bed; I didn't sleep a bit last night," said Mr. Wilson shortly after they returned to the bare drawing-room, guiltless of all decoration, where Lady Maud's Parisian teagown looked so oddly out of place.