"How interesting! What a heavenly garden! I only have just met Mrs. Halton. Every one says she is too fascinating."
"She is perfectly charming," said he. "Is that the same thing?"
"Oh, not at all; you may be perfectly charming without being the least fascinating. No man ever wants to marry a perfectly charming woman; they only think it delightful when one of their friends does so."
Daisy had heard most of this as the two left the verandah and strolled off down the garden, and the effect that it had on her was to make her label Mrs. Beaumont as "horrid." She was quite aware that three-quarters of the ordinary light conversation that went on between people who were not friends but only acquaintances was not meant to be taken literally, and that no one of any perception took it otherwise. Tribute to Aunt Jeannie's charms had been paid on both sides; the woman had heard of her as "too fascinating," Victor had found her charming. Daisy herself, from her own point of view, could find no epithet too laudatory, and she endorsed both the "fascinating" and the "charming." But she was just conscious that she would have preferred that Victor should have called her fascinating, and Mrs. Beaumont charming, rather than that it should have been the other way about.
But it was not because Mrs. Beaumont called her fascinating that Daisy labelled that unconscious lady as horrid; it was because she had made the suggestion that Lord Lindfield and her aunt had missed the train on purpose, in order, so it followed, that they should drive down together in the motor whose second thoughts were so admirable. Daisy scorned the insinuation altogether; she felt that she degraded herself by allowing herself to think of it. But that had been clearly implied.
The group round the tea-table had dispersed, and she easily found herself next Aunt Alice.
"Everything is in order, dear Aunt Alice," she said, "and Gladys has worked so hard. But I don't think I should have come down yesterday if I had known there was a symphony concert this afternoon. What did they have?"
"Brahms, I think," said Lady Nottingham, vaguely. "There is Brahms, isn't there? Neither Jeannie nor Lord Lindfield quite knew. They went to see."