“Oh! she can get out of things herself while I am with her,” said Camelia easily, as her eyes skimmed over the letter.
The new impulse was too strong to be thwarted by the slightest delay. That evening Camelia sent off a bulky letter to Lady Tramley, much astonishing that good friend by her absolute ignoring of important facts in recent history. Sir Arthur was not so much as hinted at. The whole letter bristled with cottages, and Camelia’s earnestness panted on every page.
“She is going in for philanthropy, I suppose,” Lady Tramley conjectured, shaking her head with a patient smile over the small, flowing handwriting—Camelia hated untidy scrawls. “Let us help her. Camelia is sure to do something interesting in the way of cottages. She’ll carry them through like a London season.”
Lady Tramley, as may be gathered from these remarks, was one of Camelia’s admirers, though not a blind or bigoted one. She shook her head on many occasions, but Camelia’s defects were not serious matters to her gay philosophy, and Camelia’s qualities in this frivolous world, where nothing should be peered at too closely, were attractively sparkling. As a successful hostess Lady Tramley prized the charming Miss Paton.
“Now mind,” Camelia said on arriving at her friend’s house, “I am not going to be shown to any one. I am in a monastic frame of mind, and must be kept unspotted from the world. No dances or dinners, if you please,” and she fixed her with eyes really grave.
“Very well.” Lady Tramley acquiesced as to a humorous and pretty whim. “My doors are closed while you are here—as on a retreat. But when will the season of penance be over? We are all expiating with you, remember.”
“Do I imply penance? Is that the habit my retirement wears?”
“People give you credit for all sorts of niceties of feeling.” Lady Tramley smiled her significant little smile, a smile not lavished on the nothings of intercourse, and Camelia, taking her by the shoulders, shook her softly.
“No; sly as you are you get nothing out of me, and give me credit for nothing, please, not even for curiosity as to what people do say of me.”
“You know, dear, he is to meet, I fear, a second disaster as unmerited——”