“Quite well, thank you,” said Lydia, as Aunt Beryl had taught her to say.
She despised Mrs. Clarence at sight.
The widow was very small and slight, and might have been any age between twenty-eight and thirty-nine. Her hair was of that damp, disastrous yellow, that always looks as though it had been unsuccessfully dyed, her tiny, sallow face was puckered into fretful lines, and Lydia felt convinced that she always wore just such an untidy black silk skirt, showing a sagging at the back, where it failed to meet the dingy, net blouse.
They looked at each other in silence, and Miss Nettleship said at last:
“It’s quite all right, Mrs. Clarence—I knew you’d quite understand—you mustn’t let us disturb you——”
She covered Lydia’s retreat and her own with her usual harassed, good-natured apologies.
“Mrs. Bulteel, and Miss Forster and Mr. Hector are much more lively people than poor Mrs. Clarence,” she told Lydia in a consolatory tone, on the way upstairs.
They did not pause until the top landing of all had been reached.
“This is bedroom number seventeen,” optimistically declared Miss Nettleship, throwing open a door painted liver-colour, and bearing that number on it in black figures.
It looked more like a cupboard than a bedroom to Lydia, unaccustomed to London, although faint memories of lodging-hunting in her mother’s days came back to her as she gazed round.