Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/43

 Goodness me, one need not be a blue-stocking to realize that English has a certain dignity.) She was only doing what every other girl did, he said. . . I’m as democratic as any one, but I wondered what our father would have said to the doctrine that his daughter might do a thing simply because everybody else was doing it. . . You know this Colonel Butler, perhaps? (It’s only brevet-rank; if he stays on in the army, he reverts to full lieutenant only.) I’ll confess at once that I liked him. When he was convalescent, Phyllida brought him to luncheon one day in Mount Street, and I thought him a decent, manly young fellow. I understand he comes from the west of England; and that, perhaps, accounts for the accent which I thought I detected; or, of course, he may simply have been not altogether at ease. (When I commented on it afterwards to Phyllida, she insisted that he was very badly shaken by his wound and the three operations. . . I think that was the first time I suspected anything; she championed him so very warmly.) I liked him—frankly. Some one quite early in the war said something about “temporary officers” and “temporary gentlemen”—it was very naughty, but so true!—; I said to my boy Will, when Colonel Butler was gone: