“You don’t care much for any one, Mary,” said Mrs. Odd, smiling. “Your remarks on your Allersley neighbors are very pungent and very true, no doubt. People are so rarely perfect, and you only tolerate perfection.”
“Yet I have many friends, Alicia.”
“Not near Allersley?”
“Yes; I think I count Mrs. Hartley-Fox, Mrs. Maynard, Lady Mainwaring, and Miss Hibbard among my friends.”
“Mrs. Maynard is the old lady with the caps, isn’t she? What big caps she does wear! Lady Mainwaring I remember in London, trying to marry off her eighth daughter. You told me, I recollect, that she was an inveterate matchmaker.”
“She has no selfish eagerness, if that is what you understood me to mean.”
“But she does interfere a great deal with the course of events, when events are marriageable young men, doesn’t she?”
“Does she?”
“Well, you said she was a matchmaker, Mary. There was no disloyalty in saying so, for it is known by every one who knows Lady Mainwaring.”
“And, therefore, my friends are not, and need not be, perfect.”