This also was something new. She had always asked me herself until today.
“I did,” said Boris shortly.
“And you said yes, I hope?” She turned to me with a charming conventional smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I made her a low bow. “ J’avais bien l’honneur, madame ,” but refusing to take up our usual bantering tone, she murmured a hospitable commonplace and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.
“I had better go home, don’t you think?” I asked.
“Hanged if I know,” he replied frankly.
While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet.
She was wonderfully beautiful, but her colour was too deep and her lovely eyes were too bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.
“Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache, but I haven’t. Come here, Boris;” and she slipped her other arm through his. “Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won’t hurt him.”
“ À la bonheur! ” I cried, “who says there are no thunderstorms in April?”
“Are you ready?” chanted Boris. “Aye ready;” and arm-in-arm we raced into the dining-room, scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three, and I not quite twenty-one.