“Ah,” said Miss Bandflower, shaking her head, “I always thought those letters of hers were not what I call spontaneous. Like being in prison for her, isn’t it—practically?”
Rosamund whitened, and Frederick Tregaskis remarked in a detached tone:
“I suppose that by ‘practically’ you merely mean, like every other woman, ‘theoretically.’”
“He! he! he!” giggled Minnie nervously, as she invariably did when addressed by Frederick, thereby causing him to cast upon her an infuriated glance of contempt, as he relapsed into his habitual silence.
“Do you think she’s happy?” asked Bertha, looking sharply up from her knitting.
“She said she was, and that she felt in the right place.”
“A place for everything and everything in its place,” muttered Minnie. “Ah well!”
“H’m! She evidently knows better than the Almighty then, since the place He put her into was Porthlew, in my opinion. However, she’s like so many of her generation—finding it easier to serve abroad than to be served at home. Poor little girl! Did she look well, Rosamund?”
“Fairly.”
“Only fairly?”