The brazenness of it! My Lord guffawed again. He certainly was in a most unpleasant mood.
“Huthen. I hope you’ll be as successful as my Lady there!”
“Oh! My Lady Kilcroney!...”
“Sure, isn’t it the surprise of her life.” Kilcroney once again waded heavily in sarcasm. “She hadn’t as much as the faintest notion such a thing could happen to her—had you, me Lady? She hadn’t as much as opened her mouth for the plum”—it was perhaps the purple artifice on the table that suggested the simile—“but didn’t it drop into it? It’s going to be Lady-in-Waiting she is, in place of my Lady Flo——”
“Oh! my Lord, say you so? Says he right, my dearest Lady Kilcroney? ’Tis the most splendid, the most monstrous delightful news I’ve heard this long time. Oh!” cried Mrs. Lafone, clasping and wringing her hands in an ecstasy. “May not your little Molly rejoice with you?”
“You are vastly disinterested,” said Kitty.
Mrs. Lafone gave her tinkling laugh.
“Ah, my Lady—indeed, my Lord, I have said that I am frank. Dearest Lady Kilcroney, I will be frank—If I could obtain some little post—the teeniest, weeniest little post at court——”
But Kitty interrupted, bouncing out of her stateliness.
“Pray, Mrs. Lafone, for what post should you consider yourself qualified about the august person of our gracious Queen?”