She held up five fingers, laughing.
“I know.”
“I can’t believe that I once spent five pounds a year, or thereabouts, on gloves, but I suppose I did. I don’t really know how I could manage now, if mummie didn’t still give me so many presents.”
She looked at him with her head on one side, rather like a very pretty squirrel.
“I do manage rather well, don’t I, dear? I have to work pretty hard, you know.”
“Of course you manage well,” he said ungraciously. He hardly ever encouraged her with praise nowadays, although she was doing wonders. He only gave way to violent outbreaks of despair and self-reproach, when she assured him that she could do without things that she had had all her life, and that she wasn’t really so very tired after two bad nights with the baby.
“Isn’t it lucky I’m so strong?” she sometimes asked her friends. “I do a lot of the housework myself, you know, because we can only afford one servant, of course, and she’s a rough sort of girl. It was so funny at first, I couldn’t understand that class of servant at all. At home, of course, the maids were all quite different. Ellen means very well, really, though I’ve had to learn cooking, so as to do a certain amount myself. Will you forgive me now, if I run to see that Richard’s supper is all right—not burning?”
She tripped away, still laughing, in spite of the tired lines that were beginning to show beneath her sparkling dark eyes.
“Rita is too wonderful, poor darling!” said Lady Clyde. “As she says herself, she’s never in her life been used to poverty. And look at the way she makes the best of things! You know they’re living on her tiny little income, that she manages too wonderfully for words. You can’t say now, Charles, as I remember you once did, that Rita, of all people, wasn’t fitted to take the risk of poverty.”
Whether Sir Charles could, or could not, have repeated his axiom, was not destined to be made clear, for he said nothing at all.