“There can’t be very many rooms to choose from, in such a small house. I wonder what their idea of dinner may be—or supper, I suppose one ought to call it. Not bread and water, I do trust.”
Nina’s gloomy forebodings were not realized. The meal was abundant and not badly cooked, from potato soup to hashed mutton and cabinet pudding.
A rather formidable-looking old lady of immense size, with the inevitable black veil on her scanty white hair, and a bristling moustache adorning her upper lip, sat at the head of the long table. Opposite her was a stout Spanish girl who might have been of any age between eighteen and thirty-five, with oily-looking plaits of black hair coiled flatly against each ear. The intervening places were for the most part filled with black-clad, creaking ladies of uncertain years, each one of whom was either extremely fat or abnormally thin, and a sprinkling of French and Spanish girls in brightly coloured blouses with the black veil either pinned on to each chignon or flung scarf-wise over the shoulders.
A young English nun greeted the new-comers as they made their rather tardy appearance.
“Mrs. Severing, isn’t it—and Miss Grantham? Just in time for supper. Will you sit here, Mrs. Severing, next to Mrs. Mulholland?”
The mountainous Mrs. Mulholland bowed ceremoniously from her seat at the head of the table.
“And you’ll sit here, dear, next to your friend,” the nun continued to Frances. “Now you must all make acquaintance as quickly as you can, since by this time to-morrow there’ll be no more talking and the opportunity will be gone.”
There was a general laugh at this pleasantry, in which the nun herself joined heartily as she left the dining-room.
Mrs. Mulholland turned to Nina Severing.
“This is the first time you’ve been here, isn’t it?”