I do not answer, for the sound of voices is ceasing, Milly is drawing on her gloves; and who cares to hear his or her witty or flattering remarks cut ignominiously short by an universal uprising of petticoats?
"And whom?" says Paul's eager voice in my ear, but I turn my head away with a mischievous smile. Milly is collecting the glances of her compeers now, and I leave my seat with the rest.
"You shall tell me by-and-by," says Paul decidedly, as he holds the door open for me to pass out last of all, behind the bashaw-like tails of my elders and betters.
"Do not be too sure," I say laughing. "And now," I think to myself, "for a time of penance. Women can be cosy enough together if they all know one another well, but a jumble of relations, friends, and acquaintances—never!"
Silvia has vanished when I reach the drawing-room. No one abhors her own sex more heartily than she, and I do not feel inclined to make friends with the sisters, who are sitting on a distant couch, chattering very earnestly, reporting progress no doubt. The matrons sit in a ring and discourse of babies and the extraordinary rascality of their servants, male and female. I am not married, and I have no servants, not even a lady's maid, so I turn my back on the drawing-room and go upstairs to the Lovelace and Luttrell nurseries, and look at the babies, happy little souls, with their perfectly blank memories, that enable them to sleep on and on and on, with nothing to awaken them save hunger. They look such soft, round little cherubs, with their tiny clenched fists touching their cheeks. I never can see a baby without pausing to dream over it, and recalling with an amazed wonder the fact that all our great heroes and statesmen and illustrious men were even thus once—yes, and our murderers, our felons, and our outlaws.
