Lydia exchanged bows rather nervously right and left. Mr. Bulteel, who had a melancholy yellow face with prominent eyes, and wore an alpaca coat, and trousers that bagged at the knees, was the only person to smile at her—a doubtful, sallow sort of smile.
Lydia noticed that the Greek, although he had not been named by the manageress, also bowed, much more elaborately than anybody else, and sought her eye with a meaning look, as though some understanding already existed between them.
The meal was a very silent one.
“We quite miss Miss Forster; she’s always so bright,” Miss Nettleship remarked in a general sort of way. “I expect she’s gone to those friends of hers again, for Bridge.”
Miss Nettleship did not visibly partake of the entirety of dinner. When the tepid soup had been handed round by a particularly heavy-footed, loud-breathing servant, who never seemed to have quite enough space to move round the table without slightly lurching against the back of each chair in turn, Miss Nettleship rose and hurried away to the basement.
“I always do the carving downstairs,” she told Lydia in a whisper. “Then there’s no question of favouring.”
Equally Miss Nettleship disappeared again after the meat course, presumably to perform the same office by the pudding.
“I’m so sorry, dear—but you know what it is—one can’t trust those girls to themselves for a moment. Irene’s such a feather-head, and poor old Agnes——”
Miss Nettleship squeezed past the chairs, and hurried away without particularizing the deficiencies of poor old Agnes. Nor did they require pointing out, Lydia reflected drily, if Agnes was, as she supposed, the cook.
After Miss Nettleship had left the room, the conversation, such as it was, mostly came from Mrs. Clarence and Mrs. Bulteel, a pinched, anæmic-looking little Cockney with frizzy, colourless hair.