Lady Raygan, a singularly young-looking, red-faced woman of boyish figure, and with stick-out teeth, was a leading militant suffragette. When she embarked hastily for Queenstown she had just been rescued by her son from the London police. At first she had been too seasick to care that she was being carried past her home and
that a series of lectures she had intended giving would be delayed. Now, in America, she had determined to make the best of a bad bargain by sending the fiery cross through the States.
She stayed in her room and jotted down notes. Also, she conscientiously tried to make Mrs. Rolls a suffragette. About most other things she was absent-minded; therefore Ena did not waste gray matter in worrying over the impression that Sea Gull Manor was making on Lady Raygan.
It was Rags and Eileen whose observing eyes and sense of humour had to be feared. Eileen, for instance, had a little way of saying that anything she considered odd was "too endlessly quaint." Things she admired were "melting." If only Ena had known enough about earls and their families to be sure whether Lord Raygan and Eileen would, in their secret hearts, think the ways of the Rollses endlessly quaint or melting, she might have been spared sleepless nights. Because the difference between those two adjectives would mean the difference between ecstasy and despair for her. Rags might be poor for an earl, even an Irish earl, but he was hardly the sort to propose to a girl his sister could speak of as "endlessly quaint."
Twelve days after they had arrived at Sea Gull Manor, Eileen wrote a somewhat ungrammatical letter to a rich cousin in Dublin who had once refused Rags, and in which she said:
DEAR POBBLES:
I wish you were here to pinch me. Then I would be sure whether I'm asleep or awake. You'll know by the papers
(s'pose poor old Rags is worth a paragraph; anyhow Mubs is, now she's turned into a suff) how we got carried on in the Monarchic to New York. It won't be the fault of American reporters if you've missed our news! They got at us on the dock. Mubs loved it. Rags didn't.
Well, if you know a thing about us, since we were swept past Queenstown by a giant wave that carried us on its back all the way to America, you know we're staying with a family named Rolls. Rags met Miss Rolls and her brother in London. And afterward they happened to be on board our ship, so we chummed up, and Miss Rolls would give up her melting suite to poor half-dead Mubs and me. What a beast the sea is! I don't know if I shall ever have the courage to go on the disgusting old wet thing again. We came here to stay a fortnight, but it's almost that now, and we couldn't be driven away with a stick.
We're having the time of our lives (I'm learning lots of creamy American slang), and the Rollses are awfully kind. Ena is very nice, when she doesn't try to talk as if she were English, and quite handsome, with fine eyes, though not so good as her brother's. And he—the brother, I mean—is the dearest thing in the shape of a man you ever saw. Not that he's wonderfully handsome or anything, but, as they say over here, he's just IT. I don't know what there is about him, but—well, if I go on, I suppose you'll think I'm being silly.