“How too wonderful she is,” said Lady Argent in an undertone to the universe at large. “Bertie, you must let us read your stories.”
“Oh no, my dear. They’re only just scribbled off between a Mothers’ Meeting and a dairy class—just anyhow. What would the writer say to that?”
She looked roguishly at Ludovic.
“How I envy you! If I had nothing else to do but sit in this magnificent study, I should try and write a book, perhaps; but as it is ... I envy you.”
There was an instant’s silence.
An unpardonable instinct to see whether it were possible thoroughly to disconcert his mother’s friend seized upon Ludovic.
“I wish to goodness,” he said slowly, and with an entirely assumed bitterness of tone, “that I had something to do besides sit in a study and scribble—it’s not fit for a man.”
It was almost the first time that his mother had ever heard him allude to his infirmity, and she flushed from brow to chin.
But Mrs. Tregaskis was more than equal to the situation, as its creator had surmised that she would be.
The jovial lines of her face softened into kindly compassion, and the slow noddings of her head were portentous with understanding: