Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/242

Rh “Well, you’ve Dr. Wyant!” Mrs. Amherst suddenly ﬂung back at her.

Justine coloured under the unexpected thrust, but met her friend’s eyes steadily. “As an alternative to Westy? Well, if I were on a desert island—but I’m not!” she concluded with a careless laugh.

Bessy frowned and sighed. “You can’t mean that, of the two——?” She paused and then went on doubtfully: “It’s because he’s cleverer?”

“Dr. Wyant?” Justine smiled. “It’s not making an enormous claim for him!”

“Oh, I know Westy’s not brilliant; but stupid men are not always the hardest to live with.” She sighed again, and turned on Justine a glance charged with conjugal experience.

Justine had sunk into the window-seat, her thin hands clasping her knee, in the attitude habitual to her meditative moments. “Perhaps not,” she assented; “but I don’t know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.”

Bessy met this with a pitying exclamation. “Don’t imagine you invented that! Every girl thinks it. Afterwards she ﬁnds out that it’s much pleasanter to be thought interesting herself.”

She spoke with a bitterness that issued strangely from her lips. It was this bitterness which gave her soft [ 226 ]