“If I were Claudia I should leave him at home,” said Rhoda coolly. “I always leave mine at home. I tell people not to invite him. A husband is always the skeleton at the feast.”
“Why have a husband at all?” said Pat lightly, who knew her Rhoda.
“It’s a bad habit we shall outgrow in time, like needle-work and charity. A husband is like your appendix. When you don’t know it’s there, it’s no use, and when you do, it’s a nuisance.”
“Had any tea?” inquired Patricia of Image.
“No, will you take me and give me some?” They walked together to the next room. “Dear me, would you mind hobbling on your knees, or providing me with stilts? After the miniature women of Japan you take my breath away. The modern Englishwoman is really a glorious creature.”
Pat laughed amiably. “I’m a sort of yard-measure, aren’t I? It’s a nuisance really, except when you get in a crowd. Mother winces every time she sees me, and father says my feet are larger than his.”
But Image looked admiringly at her over the edge of his tea-cup. To him this fine young girl, so amazingly fresh and healthy, Saxon in colouring, with the limbs of an athlete, was most attractive, though he knew she made his own lack of inches more conspicuous.
“I suppose we shall have you getting married soon?” he said, beaming on her through his glasses.
Patricia shrugged her broad shoulders and nibbled at a sandwich. “Didn’t you hear Rhoda say that we women are getting out of the habit?”
“She talks a lot of nonsense. Don’t listen to it. You are much too fresh and sweet to repeat such horrible cynicism.”
“We are all cynical nowadays. How is it you have escaped? How have you managed to keep on believing in people and things?”
Image answered quite simply and directly. “By loving a woman, my dear. To love a woman well keeps the core of a man’s heart from withering and getting old. My blessings on all your sex, even a Rhoda Carnegie, because of _her_.”
It was said so naturally that Patricia, who, like all young things, recoiled from any display of sentiment, could not find any fault with the frankness with which he had replied to her question. She became a little graver, and whether by accident or the prompting of some hidden association of ideas, she glanced up at the opposite wall, where hung a portrait of Gilbert, a wedding-present from the tenants on his father’s estate.