"Ah, she did her best to ruin him in life, and she succeeded in killing him," said Lady Ardingly very dryly. "I do not want news of her. She is a cook."
"I also do not want to talk of her," she said. "She is very gay this winter, I believe. She says it would look so odd if she didn't do things, just because of that awful accident. She thinks people would talk."
"She has a horror of that, I know," said Lady Ardingly, "except when they are not talking about her. If they are not talking about her, she joins in it. Did she, in confidence, tell you----"
"Yes, she told me in confidence that it was she who had started that silly story about me. She told me also that you knew it. So I am not violating her confidence."
Lady Ardingly made a noise in her throat which resembled gargling.
"That is enough," she said. "What else, dear Marie?"
"Well, Jim is coming out here in a week or so. He cannot get away any sooner. I have seen him a good deal."
"And you will in the future see him even oftener," suggested Lady Ardingly.
"Much oftener. I shall see him every day."
"I am very glad of that," she said; "I have a great respect for Mr. Spencer. I see constantly that he is attacking my poor Ardingly. And I respect you also, my dear. You are the nicest good woman I know. Ah! my dear, when you are old like me, you will have pleasant back-pages to turn over."
"And to whom shall I owe them?" asked Marie.
"To your own good sense. My dear, I am not often sentimental. But I feel sentimental when I think of one morning in last July. You were a good woman always, Marie, I should imagine. That day you were a grand one, too--superb! I admired you, and it is seldom that I admire people."
There was a long silence. With the swiftness of sunset in the South, the colours were struck from the gay crowds, and where ten minutes before had been a riot of blues and reds, there was only a succession of various gray. But overhead the stars burned close and large, and the pale northern heavens were here supplanted by a velvet blue.
"And I admired Jack," said Lady Ardingly at length. "He was weak, if you like, and, if you choose, he was wicked. But there was, how shall I say it? the possibility of the big scale about him. That is the best thing; the next is to know that you are small. The worst is not to know that you are small."