Camelia sank into a chair, languidly detesting Mrs. Jedsley’s bad taste.
“You did so much for the cause, too, didn’t you?” said Mrs. Jedsley, deterred by no delicate scruples. “Come, Camelia, confess that it has been a tumble for you all!”
“Too evident a tumble I think to require confession.”
“And Mr. Rodrigg here for such a time! You are less clever than I thought you—don’t be offended—I mean it in a complimentary sense. Then, after all, it isn’t a brush you need mind losing. I never thought much of the bill myself.”
Camelia sat coldly unresponsive, and Lady Paton tried to smile at Mrs. Jedsley’s remarks and to believe them purely humorous.
“I am sorry for poor Michael,” she said, “I fear he has taken it to heart.” This unconscious opening was only too gratefully seized upon by Mrs. Jedsley, who, after a meaning glance at Mary, fixed, over her tea-cup, sharp eyes on Camelia.
“Ah!” she said, “he is a man cut out for misfortunes—they all fit him. He is bound to fail in everything he undertakes.”
“I can’t agree with you there,” Camelia spoke acidly. “I think he succeeds at a great many things.”
“Things he doesn’t care about, then, you may be sure of that. Fortune follows such men like a stray dog they have no use for, while they are looking for their own lost pet.”
Camelia drank her tea in silence, priding herself somewhat on her forbearance, pondering, too, on the pathos of Mrs. Jedsley’s simile in which she could only see a purely personal applicability. It was not him the stray dog followed, but any number followed her—and it was she who had lost her all.