“I don’t know. It’s an awful nuisance. You can’t get black blouses that will wash; it will be awful in the summer; besides it’s so unbecoming.”
“There I can’t agree. It would be for me. It makes me look dingy; but it suits you, throws up your rose-leaf complexion and your golden hair. But I call it jolly hard lines. I’d like to see the governor dictating to me what I should wear.”
“It’s so expensive if one can’t wear out one’s best things.”
“It’s intolerable. Why do you stand it?”
“What can I do?”
“Tell them you must either wear scarlet at the office or have a higher screw.”
“It isn’t an office you see. I have to be so much in the surgeries and interviewing people in the waiting-room, you know.”
“Yes—from dukes to dustmen. But would either the dukes or the dustmen disapprove of scarlet.”
“One has to be a discreet nobody. It’s the professional world; you don’t understand; you are equals, you two, superiors, pampered countesses in your offices.”
“Well I think it’s a beastly shame. I should brandish a pair of forceps at Mr. Hancock and say ‘scarlet—or I leave.’”