Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/96

age, when on earth would she do so? One part of this argument, at least, was true: Lizzie certainly enjoyed herself, and there is no greater merit in a habitual visitor. Life was a summerday’s pleasure to her as yet, and she danced on the greensward all day long, while her good little husband paid the piper. She was kind, too, in her own way, and even considerate to him, in return. Sometimes she had the air of bearing with him gently, with his misplaced economies and inconvenient generosities; with his habit of brushing his hat while he talked, and his prim old-fashioned way of always finishing his sentences in the precise grammatical fashion of an elder day. He admired his wife immensely, and was even a little jealous of any possible rival to her place and pinnacle of fashion. He did not always appear by her side in the rapid gyrations of her gaieties, for he possessed neither her untiring digestion nor her youthful activity, but he had unlimited confidence in her judgment, and liked to see her sought after by the most brilliant portion of their little colonial world. To his old-fashioned bourgeois ideas there was something sacred about a title, and when Lizzie went out under the shadow of a coronet it almost seemed as if she were under the protection of the Church. So time