They were both young; one had a long black plait down her back. Both of them wore the same expression of suppressed and gleeful, giggling excitement as I told them that Miss Million was at home.
"Then, now for it!" breathed the flapper with the plait, in a gale of a whisper, as I took her mackintosh. Both girls were in blue serge underneath, of a cut more chastened than their arrogantly young voices. "I wonder what on earth she's going to be like!"
"Alice! Do shut up!" muttered the elder girl angrily. Then, turning to me: "Are there crowds of other people here already?"
"Yes, Miss," I answered demurely. But I felt a sudden warm sympathy with the two young things in the hall. We had, I suspected, the same kind of voice, the same carriage of the head, we had had the same sort of clothes.
We'd been "raised," as Mr. Jessop puts it, with much the same outlook. We had a class in common, the class of the nouveaux-pauvres! Our eyes flashed understanding as they met.
Then the younger girl exclaimed: "Wait a minute. I must finish laughing before we go in!"
And she stood for a full minute, quivering and swaying and rocking with perfectly silent mirth. Then she pulled herself together and said gravely:
"Right. I've finished now. Say the Miss Owens, please."
I rather wanted to have a good silent laugh to myself as I solemnly announced the two girls.
They came, I afterwards gleaned, from the long white house that faces us across the valley. Who the other people were who were filling the chintz-covered couch and easy-chairs in the drawing-room I didn't gather.