For her life Paula could but look conscious with the eyes of both men on her face.
“He doesn’t seem an exponent of a sore heart.” She stumbled inexcusably in her clumsy embarrassment. There was an awkward silence. The implication that Adrian might be representative passed as untenable, and the subject of hearts was eschewed thereafter.
“Miss Dean has been quite famous as a beauty and belle in her brief career,” Mr. Floyd-Rosney deigned to contribute to the conversation.
“She is wonderfully attractive--so original and interesting,” said Ducie warmly.
“It seems to me Hilda carries her principal assets in her face,” said Mrs. Floyd-Rosney. “They say she wouldn’t learn a thing at the convent--and what is worse, she feels no lack.”
“What does any woman learn?” demanded Floyd-Rosney iconoclastically, “and what does any woman’s education signify? A mosaic of worthless smattering, expensive to acquire, and impossible to apply. Miss Dean lacks nothing in lacking this equipment.”
Paula sat affronted and indignant. In her husband’s sweeping assertion he had not had the courtesy to except her, and it was hardly admissible for Ducie to repair the omission. He could only carry the proposition further and make it general, and his tact seized the opportunity.
“I think that might be said of the youth of both sexes. The fakir, with his learning made-easy, is the foible of the age and its prototype extends to business methods--the get-rich-quick opportunities match the education-while-you-wait, and the art, reduced to a smudge with a thumb, and the ballads of a country--the voice of the heart of the people, superseded by ragtime.”
“If women are constitutionally idiots and cannot be taught,” she cried, “they ought not to be responsible for folly. That is a charter wide as the winds.”
“Not at all--not at all,” said her husband dogmatically. But how he would have reconciled the variant dicta of incapacity and accountability must remain a matter of conjecture, for there came suddenly on the air the iterative sound of the swift beat of hoofs and, through the open door in another moment, was visible a double phaëton drawn by a glossy, spirited blood bay, brought with difficulty to a pause and lifting alternately his small forefeet with the ardor of motion, even when the pressure on the bit in his mouth constrained his eager activity and brought him to a halt.