“Of course, cousin Claire is almost always wrong.”
“You only mean that you and she generally hold different opinions.”
Martyn laughed, but after a minute he said reflectively: “That woman hard? I wonder what we were all thinking about.”
It is not Mary Ambrey’s way to ask questions, and Martyn did not elucidate. He only looked as though he were seeing again something that might have struck him that afternoon, and repeated, with a rather derisive inflection in his cocksure young voice, “That woman hard?”
The “Bulbul Ameer” play was gradually being built up, under the usual frightful difficulties, by a number of people who were all determined to help.
The Kendals faithfully attended every rehearsal en bloc, although only Alfred and Amy were to take parts, Amy being alleged by Mumma to be possessed of a voice.
“Not a great deal of Ear perhaps—not one of them has an ear, I’m afraid—but Amy certainly has a Voice. I’ve said from the days when they were all little tots together, that Amy certainly had a voice. Don’t you remember, girls, my telling you long ago that Amy was the only one with a voice?”
The Kendals, of course, remembered quite well. They never fail Mumma.
Amy and the Voice were admitted into the cast and that, as Bill Patch said, was all right. But it didn’t entitle Alfred Kendal to come out in the new, and insufferable, guise in which he presently appeared.
(“I do think that amateur theatricals bring out all that is worst in human nature,” Sallie thoughtfully remarked to me once.)