“In your what days?” asked Miss Cleeve faintly.
And Mrs Valetta said in a curious voice: “Can you possibly mean the Latin Quarter of Paris?”
“I can, indeed,” quoth I affably. “I once had a studio there for six months, and all the art students used to come in the evening and make coffee and Welsh rarebit, and every delicious imaginable thing.”
“My sister-in-law’s guardian is an American artist with eccentric ideas about educating girls to see every phase of life,” said Judy in the stuffiest, snuffiest kind of voice. “Of course, Deirdre had a chaperon.”
“Yes, and she was far more racketty than I,” said I with malice prepense. Elizabet von Stohl would have fallen down dead if she could have heard herself so traduced! But I was feeling very much annoyed with Judy for speaking in that way about dear Betty and her lovely liberal ideas. The men for some reason or other thought my remark very amusing, but the women all looked frightfully disdainful, except Mrs Brand, who spoke one of her brief, eloquent sentences:
“It must have been rippin’.”
There were peals of laughter, and I looked at her in astonishment, and found that she had quite a friendly enthusiastic air.
“And so is this coffee rippin’,” said Gerry Deshon. “You’ll have to give us all lessons, Miss Saurin, or we’ll never dare ask you to supper.”
“Oh, that’s nothing to what I can do,” I bragged. “You should taste my cup—and I’m a frightful dab at rum-punch.” I had all the women very cross by now, so I thought they might as well stay so. The men, on the contrary, were as gay as larks at heaven’s gate singing. “And I’m going to give a Quartier Latin supper to-night,” I told them; “Welsh rarebit, les apôtres sur les bicyclettes, devilled eggs—”
“There are no materials in the house for all these things,” protested Judy crossly.