THE SACRED FOUNT
"No, you dress, I make out, ninety-three. If you would only dress twenty-five you'd look fifteen."
"Fifteen in a schoolroom charade!" She laughed at this happily enough. "Your compliment to my taste is odd. I know, at all events," she went on, "what's the difference in Mr. Long."
"Be so good then, for my relief, as to name it."
"Well, a very clever woman has for some time past———"
"Taken"—this beginning was of course enough—"a particular interest in him? Do you mean Lady John?" I inquired; and, as she evidently did, I rather demurred. "Do you call Lady John a very clever woman?"
"Surely. That's why I kindly arranged that, as she was to take, I happened to learn, the next train, Guy should come with her."
"You arranged it?" I wondered. "She's not so clever as you then."
"Because you feel that she wouldn't, or couldn't? No doubt she wouldn't have made the same point of it—for more than one reason. Poor Guy hasn't pretensions—has nothing but his youth and his beauty. But that's precisely why I'm sorry for him and try whenever I can to give him a lift. Lady John's company is, you see, a lift."
"You mean it has so unmistakably been one to Long?"
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