Chapter VII

On the terrace of Wynwood, Vingie, curled subtly in a wicker armchair, passed and repassed her needle through a scrap of fine, hand-woven linen.

Hard by, Rupert, in a similar armchair, his tall lank form (once so unkempt, but Love is greatest of reformers) clothed in gray lounge suiting, straight from the caressing shears of Savile Row, glared stonily at her admirable profile. At last she said thoughtfully:

"Rupert, you needn't sit there looking at me as if we were married and I were sewing tiny garments with an inscrutable smile on my face. We're nothing of the sort, and I'm only embroidering a hanky."

"My dear Virginia," retorted Rupert with the most irritating patience, "if any one has a right to be justly annoyed, it is I, not you. I hardly know on what grounds you see fit to criticize me. I have just endured the deepest insult a woman has it in her power to offer with, I trust, exemplary good manners."

"I've done nothing of the sort. I merely refused to marry you."

"That," explained Rupert, "is the insult to which I referred."

Vingie leaned back in her chair, and gazed in front of her with an expression of serene amusement. Small breezes kissed her satin cheek and disturbed her fair hair, bearing from the rose-garden faint, intoxicating scents. Her heart sang little songs of triumph, inarticulate things which if interpreted would have described how a tall strong gentleman murdered other tall strong gentlemen for love of her, subsequently dragging her away by the hair to a sequence of unparalleled honeymoons. She turned again to Rupert.

"Anything more ghastly selfish than men I never met," she complained. "You may not remember, Rupert, that yesterday I was twenty-one. In spite of that you'd like to tie me down, a mere girl, for life, never, officially at any rate, to look at any other man but you. There are thousands of men in the world I've never met; some day I s'pose I shall have to marry, but the time is far off."

Rupert rose and shook his shoulders with a hardly perceptible gesture, as if he shed a weight of an unbearable responsibility.

"I don't feel as if I could stay in the house any longer," he announced bitterly. "I dare say in time I shall be able to meet you with comparative calm, Virginia, but at the moment my most sacred feelings have been outraged. I shall go down to the Home Farm and ask Mrs. Giles if she can give me a bed over the week-end. I return to town on Monday in any case. Perhaps you will be kind enough to explain my absence to Uncle Charles."

He stalked moodily from the terrace. Vingie watched him go with a faint shrug. "The child deprived of his toy. How babyish all men are when it comes to the point when they can't get what they want!" she murmured. "I dare say I shall have difficulties even with dear Charles when I tell him. But there! Why meet trouble half-way?"

She rose, stretched our her arms to the incalculable promise of sun and blue sky, and sauntered slowly indoors toward the dim coolness of the library.

Sir Charles rose to greet her from the depths of his armchair, placed the book he was reading carefully on a table and smiled with exactly the right mixture of homage and affection.

He said gently:

"Crabbed age and youth can not live together, but I will at least make every effort. You look singularly resolute, my dear Virginia. It is a very warm day for resolution."

She laid a hand affectionately on his shoulder, pushed him back into the chair, sat on the arm of it and gazed down at him.

"Charles," Vingie began. "I've just refused to marry Rupert."

If Sir Charles was surprised he did not show it.

"Marriage," he observed, "is a woman's fortress and man's prison. One day you will come to it, and then you may remember what I say."

"As I've told you before, he doesn't know a thing about women; he can't make love, I might as well marry a wild animal, and I don't want to marry any one," objected Vingie.

"When you do, there may not be any one to marry," retorted Sir Charles. "Competition in the marriage market becomes more a matter of ferocity every day."

Vingie ran caressing fingers through his hair.

"Charles, do you realize I was twenty-one yesterday?"

"I thought my humble string of pearls, all that my financial position will allow at the moment, but I wish it had been ten times as long----"

"Hush, darling! They were perfectly lovely. What I mean is, I'm grown up. I want to try my own wings just a teeny bit. It isn't that you're not an angel to me, but every grown-up person has to taste blood once in a lifetime. Leonie Falsecastle's going to stay in East Africa for a bit, and she'd let me her flat off Portland Place. She leaves a very decent cook, and I can take Mary to look after me. You won't mind, will you, Charles?"

"'To-day the almonds bloom in Kandahar,'" quoted Sir Charles. "Only youth breaks its heart over partings, Virginia, but I shall be sorry if you persist very long in this idea. I have a horror of what is called the bachelor girl. Women were meant to be taken care of by some man. Independence, as it is called, demoralizes them dreadfully. Their faces take on an aggressive expression, and they gnash their teeth when they speak. However, the experience will be good for you and you have been so accustomed to consideration that it may not endure very long."

"You're so sensible, Charles, I'm afraid you've lived a very bad life," murmured Vingie. "Opposition would have hardened me, but now I don't want to go a little bit."

"Well," observed Sir Charles, "all I beg of you is not to invite me to dinner. The greatest curse in life at my age is inferior cookery and a haphazard idea of housekeeping. However advanced women may suppose themselves to be nowadays, they still consider a bottle of wine and a bottle of Worcester sauce in much the same spirit."

Vingie slid from the arm of the chair, hesitated and stood for a moment in thought.

"I hope I didn't hurt Rupert's feelings," she said at last. "Of course he's a dear thing really. But, Charles, he asked me to tell you he can't stay under the same roof with me. He's going over to the home farm till Monday morning."

Sir Charles hastened to reassure her.

"You needn't feel the least alarm, my dear Virginia. A man's first instinct on meeting with a reverse at the hands of a woman is to make himself as uncomfortable as possible. It's a sort of sentimental homeopathy; one form of misery counteracts the other. I should be grieved if he were to drown his sorrows in drink, but the difference between his bedroom here and his bedroom there is unimportant. He will even enjoy his privations in some extraordinary way."

"Men," complained Vingie, "have an appalling knack of proposing at the wrong moment."

"No doubt you are right," responded Sir Charles. "As it happens I can not speak from personal experience. I have always exercised restraint in these matters."