How am I going to stand a whole fortnight of it? How am I to keep up this incessant pose and pretence under the gentle, unsuspecting eyes of Mrs. Waters?
I believe I could have calmly invented fib after fib for the benefit of Lady Vandeleur——
Now, now! Thoughts beginning with “Vandeleur” have got to be sternly suppressed unless I mean to give myself a fit of the blues and make some terrible faux pas presently, at dinner, in the bosom of the Governor’s family.
So come, Monica Trant, my child—“Nancy,” I mean, of course, Nancy! (How I hope I shall remember to answer to that name when I hear it, instead of forgetting who they mean and imagining it’s the little white dog!) You pull yourself together, Nancy, and dive into the pretty new evening-frock—it will be gorgeous to have proper lights and a real glass to dress by once again!—then go and show it off to that avid-eyed child in the school-room. And then downstairs with you, to earn some more of your five hundred pounds!
CHAPTER XII
THE FIRST DINNER
Well! the first evening is over.
It hasn’t been nearly as bad as it might, though it certainly has produced several more quite unexpected developments.
We dined; for the first time for well over a year I sat down at a luxuriously-appointed round dinner-table with all its conventional daintiness of perfect napery, silver and glass—instead of the picnic-supper affair, with every single plate and fork an “oddment,” cast by the hands of Mrs. Skinner upon the rickety table at Marconi Mansions. Instead of gossiping with Cicely Harradine clad in the faded green Japanese kimono that she finds “such a rest to slop into” after all the fashionable dressing-up at Chérisette’s—for Cicely is rather the type of girl whom work demoralizes instead of bracing—I was of a party of two other women and a man in evening-dress.