"The bath, Kiddy? Absolutely imposs!" decreed London's Love. "Water comes in at the rate of a South-Eastern Dead-Stop. Turn one tap on and you turn the other off. Not to speak of there only being one bath, and that five sizes too small, dear. The Not-at-Any-Price-Vaughans must be greyhound built for slimness, if you ask me. It don't seem to fit our shrinking Violet, as you can imagine. Why, look at her!"
Quite an unnecessary request, as the fascinated, horrified eyes of the whole party had not yet left her sumptuous and bedizened person.
"Call it a bath?" she concluded, with her largest and most unabashedly vulgar wink. "I'd call it a——"
We weren't privileged to hear what she could call it, for at this moment the lady with the very towny hat rose with remarkable suddenness, and asked in a concise and carrying voice that her man might be told to bring round Miss Davis's car.
I slipped out to the kitchen and to Miss Davis's man, who, as I expected, had finished an excellent tea and the subjugation of cook at the same time.
"Your mistress would like the car round at once, please," I said, with a frantic effort not to smile as I caught the mischievous, black-framed, blue eyes of the Honourable Jim Burke.
He rose. "Good afternoon, ma'am, and thank you for one of the most splendid teas I've ever had in my life," he said in that flattering voice of his to cook, as she bustled out, beaming upon him as she went into the scullery.
"Good afternoon, Miss Smith"—to me. "You've never shaken hands with me yet. But I suppose this is scarcely the moment to remind you, when I've taken on a job several pegs below what I was when I saw you last——"
Of course, at that I had to give him my hand. I said: "But why are you Miss Davis's chauffeur?"
"Because I couldn't get a job with Miss Million," he told me simply. "She hasn't got a car of her own yet. Not that she'd have me, in any case—a man she'd found out deceiving her about her own relatives!"