“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 ]
