Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/140

 diplomatically turning the subject from his own achievements, "I suppose it might improve him to have something to do; but he strikes me as a very good specimen of the ornamental young man."

"Ornamental!" echoed Dorothy sarcastically. " It would do him good to have to work for his living."

"Poor beggar, he couldn't help being born with a silver spoon in his mouth—it isn't his fault."

"Spoon!" exclaimed Miss Vandeleur. "A whole dinner service I should think. A soup-ladle at the very least. It's quite big enough: perhaps that accounts for it!"

The girl laughed, swaying back, with the grace of her years, against her cushions; then, observing that her companion's grave grey eyes were fixed upon her, she grew suddenly demure, sighing with a little air of penitence.

"I am very wicked to-day," she confessed. "It's the rain, I suppose, and want of exercise. Do you ever feel like that, Sir Geoffrey? Do you ever get into an omnibus and simply loathe and detest every single person in it? Do you long to swear—real swears, like our army in Flanders—at everybody you meet, just because it's rainy or foggy, and because they are all so ugly and horrid? I do, frequently."

"I know, I know," said the other sympathetically, while he reeled in his line and deftly untied the tiny hook. "Only, the omnibus has not figured very often in my case; it has generally been a hot court-house, or a dusty dak-bungalow full of commercial travellers. But I don't feel like that now, at all. I hope I am not responsible for your frame of mind?"

"Oh," protested Dorothy, "don't make me feel such an abandoned wretch! I should have been much worse if you had not been here. I should have quarrelled with Uncle Phil, or