"Queenie Torrance?" said Lady Isabel, still vaguely.
"Mother, you remember—I told you about her. She is the only other English girl besides me at the convent, and she knows all about father and you and everything, and her father belongs to the same Club—"
Snobbishness was not in Alex' composition, but she adopted her mother's standards eagerly and instinctively, in the hope of gaining her point.
"But, my darling, what are you talkin' about? You know mother doesn't let you have little girls here unless she knows somethin' about them. Give me the little diamond brooch, Alex; the one in the silver box there."
Lady Isabel, absorbed in the completion of her evening toilette, remained unconscious of the havoc she had wrought. Alex felt rather sick.
The intensity of feeling to which she was a victim, for the most part reacted on her physically, though she was as unconscious of this as was her mother.
But with the cunning borne of urgent desire, Alex knew that persistence, which with Sir Francis would invariably win a courteous rebuke and an immutable refusal, could sometimes bring forth rather querulous concession from Lady Isabel's weakness.
"But, mummy, darling, I do want Queenie to come here and see Barbara and Cedric."
It was not true, but Alex was using the arguments which she felt would be most likely to appeal to her mother.
"She wants to know them so much, and—and I saw her father at the station when we arrived, and he was very polite."