“Hallo, Elsie!”
“Hallo, Geraldine!”
“You’re quite a stranger, aren’t you? I think it’s about a year since we had the honour of seeing your majesty last.”
“Well, now I have come, aren’t you going to take the trouble to invite me to come in?” asked Elsie good-humouredly.
“There’s a visitor of mine in the drawing-room.”
“Who is it? Aunt Ada?”
“No, not Aunt Ada, Miss Smarty. It’s a friend of mine, I tell you, who I knew at the office during the war.”
“Well, you can introduce me to her, I suppose,” said Elsie carelessly.
She noticed that Geraldine’s hair was not, as it generally was, in curling-pins, and that she was wearing a new dress, of an unbecoming shade of emerald green. Geraldine always went wrong over her clothes, Elsie reflected complacently. She herself wore a new black picture hat, and it was partly from the desire to show herself in it that she had come to her old home.
“Where’s mother?”