“What an ungracious manner, and how typical of her class! I said she was common,” Claire observed when Mrs. Harter had disappeared.
“I think she’s shy.”
Nancy Fazackerly is always ready to sacrifice truth to kindliness, as we all know. Perhaps it is the effect of having successively known a father and a husband, both of whom appear to have lived in a chronic state of annoyance with everybody.
“It was a nice concert, wasn’t it?” she added, with her childlike appreciation of any form of pleasuring.
We said that we had enjoyed it very much, and Mrs. Kendal added that the only thing she regretted was that the Kendal family had not been able to get seats all together. It being impossible to remove this blot on the evening, her complaint was received in silence by us all.
Then Lady Annabel came out, bowing in an indiscriminate sort of way, and saying, “Thank you—thank you so much,” to anyone who accidentally stood in her way.
“Quite a success, wasn’t it?” she asked us, and we all said at once that it had been a great success, and Nancy congratulated her.
“It entails a good deal of work, getting up this sort of thing and it is all so different when one cannot delegate part of the work to the A. D. C.s,” said Lady Annabel.
If the rector of Cross Loman kept a curate, I feel convinced that Lady Annabel would speak of him as “the A. D. C.” or perhaps “the P. S.”
“I hope you will have made a good deal of money,” said Mrs. Fazackerly. “I always think it’s wonderful, the way in which people here are always ready to spend money.”