Irene pursed up her lips and shook her head. “He asked me to tell you to ring him up first thing this morning. If you ask me, you’re in for trouble. And p’r’aps now you’ll be so kind as to tell me what it all means, and why on earth you couldn’t have given me fair warning before saying you were here. It’s lucky for you I didn’t give the whole show away on the spot.”
Elsie, habitually ready to discuss any of her love-affairs with Irene, had told her nothing about Leslie Morrison. But she saw now that a degree of frankness was inevitable.
Irene listened, sitting on the kitchen table, her shrewd, cynical gaze fixed upon Elsie. “You’re for it, all right,” she observed dryly. “I thought directly I saw you after you’d got back from Torquay that there was something up. But I somehow didn’t think you’d go off the deep end like that, Elsie. Why, you’re dotty about him!”
“Yes,” said Elsie, “I am.”
“And what do you suppose is going to happen?”
Elsie groaned. “I wish to the Lord that Horace would do the decent thing, or go West—and let me have a chance of happiness.”
“He won’t,” said Irene. “Well, whatever you do, don’t make a fool of yourself and run off with this fellow. It simply isn’t worth it, when he hasn’t got a penny, and not very often when he has.”
“If I thought Horace would divorce me it’d be different,” Elsie said. She was not listening to Irene at all. “Though even then, I don’t know what we would live on. Leslie hasn’t anything except his salary, and that’s tiny, and I’m sure I couldn’t earn a penny if I tried. Mother wouldn’t help me, either, if I did a thing like that.”
“No more would anybody else. And surely to goodness, Elsie, you’d never be such a fool. Think what it would mean to be disgraced, and have a scandal.”
“I wouldn’t mind that with him.”