"Oh, father!" said Marion, rebuking him.
"Everything is awful now," said Hampstead, laughing. "Of course the word is absurd, but one gets in the way of using it because other people do."
"Nay, my lord, I crave pardon if I seemed to criticize thy language. Being somewhat used to a sterner manner of speaking, I took the word in its stricter sense."
"It is but slang from a girl's school, after all," said Roden.
"Now, Master George, I am not going to bear correction from you," said Hampstead, "though I put up with it from your elders. Miss Fay, when you were at school did they talk slang?"
"Where I was at school, Lord Hampstead," Marion answered, "we were kept in strict leading-strings. Fancy, father, what Miss Watson would have said if we had used any word in a sense not used in a dictionary."
"Miss Watson was a sensible woman, my dear, and understood well, and performed faithfully, the duties which she had undertaken. I do not know that as much can be said of all those who keep fashionable seminaries for young ladies at the West End."
"Miss Watson had a red face, and a big cap, and spectacles;—had she not?" said Hampstead, appealing to Marion Fay.
"Miss Watson," said Mrs. Roden, "whom I remember to have seen once when Marion was at school with her, was a very little woman, with bright eyes, who wore her own hair, and always looked as though she had come out of a bandbox."
"She was absolutely true to her ideas of life, as a Quaker should be," said Mr. Fay, "and I only hope that Marion will follow her example. As to language, it is, I think, convenient that to a certain extent our mode of speech should consort with our mode of living. You would not expect to hear from a pulpit the phrases which belong to a racecourse, nor would the expressions which are decorous, perhaps, in aristocratic drawing-rooms befit the humble parlours of clerks and artisans."