“Oh, it wasn’t a question of looks. Of course if she’d considered that, why, any foolish young fellow—but she knew what she would have got.”
Not being at her ease in this kind of conversation, and finding the effort to see Steptoe as Lothario difficult, Letty became blunt again. “He must have had an awful crush on the first one.”
“It wasn’t her exactly; it was the boy.”
“Oh, there was a boy?”
“Why of course, dear! Didn’t you know that?”
“Whose boy was it?”
“Why, the mistress’s boy; but I don’t think he––” Letty understood the pronoun as applying to Steptoe—“I don’t think he ever realized that he wasn’t his very own.” Straightening the white cover on the chest of drawers Miss Towell shook her head. “It was a sad case.”
“What made it sad?”
“A lovely boy he was. Had a kind word for everyone, even for the cat. But somehow his father and mother—well, they were people of the world, and they hadn’t wanted a child, and when he came—and he so delicate always—I could have cried over him.”
Letty’s heart began to swell; her lip trembled. “I know someone like that myself.”