"By Veynes just at present, probably. I meant by you and me."
"Oh, you!" she flouted. "You mightn't think yourself good enough."
It was a curious challenge for a man's matrimonial amen. The woman thirsting for love and eager to drink it; the man thirsty and afraid. She did not see the sudden change in his eyes, as though a flame went through them. She was looking the other way. But she heard the parry of his low "I should not" to her thrust. It pierced like the white pinch of frost, it ran cold even into her voice.
"Ah, you're too modest," she rallied, so briskly that he did not notice the shiver in her throat. "Besides, you're rather cowed by my frock; but how about the family?"
"Only Lord Egham! No sisters, mothers, aunts--nothing? Oh, come, that's better. And what is he like?"
"He's a dear old gentleman who dotes on his son."
"Ah, that's a big question. Perhaps his education was defective."
"Yes, the Earl of Egham, sits as Viscount Alderly."
"I see; and some day I might be a countess?"
"That's a bribe; I like the word awfully; it sounds _good_; it's like a stare to say it--the countess!--but I fancy it would be rather dreadful being one--that is, if you weren't born to it--in the cast all along, don't you know. Of course, then you could do what you liked; but if you'd only been made one, and made from a dancing girl, you'd _have_ to be proper, just to show how easy it came! And I think it would be dull," she drawled. "What do you say?"
"Not even to save poor Veynes from his fate? You could save him."
He looked slowly across at her face, which lay back idly under the yellow light, and she held her eyes squarely to his, as a maid holds a mirror to her mistress. He might search them for reflections, but he would see nothing more. In point of fact, he looked for some time without troubling their surface.
"Oh, you must treat him kindly, and show him what an excellent countess you can make."
"I fancy not. You're too human, you see; this warm, kind world is too near your heart. The great lady has nothing there but her corset; and the world--her little cold world--at her fingers' ends, in a descending scale of chilliness. Besides, you're too pretty."
"No, to be made one. You can't melt beauty for new molds without breaking the old, you know; something goes."