“No, is it?” agreed Nina gently. “I wish you’d talk to Morris a little, Bertie dear, you are so sensible, and I know he’d listen to you. He always looks upon me as too young, more like a contemporary than a mother, you know. I suppose it’s very natural.”
She sighed.
“Well,” laughed Bertha tolerantly with raised eyebrows, and contrived to insert into the monosyllable a distinct quality of scepticism with regard to Nina’s supposition.
“Anyhow,” she resumed briskly, after a moment in which to allow Nina fully to appreciate the subtlety of her retort, “I really think Morris might do worse than have a talk with me. I’ve helped plenty of boys, and of girls, too, for the matter of that, in my time. When Hazel comes out, I tell her, she’ll be cut out by her old mother. My dear, young men are always telling me they adore me, but, as I say, it’s quite safe to adore an old gargoyle.”
She laughed heartily, and Nina murmured with the deprecating smile she kept for such speeches, “How ridiculous you are, Bertie. Do enrol my poor Morris into the regiment of worshippers. I’m sure you could. It would do him a lot of good to have his thoughts taken off himself.”
“That’s what one feels,” agreed Bertha. “Self-absorption is a disease with modern youth.”
“Introspection carried to the verge of mania,” returned Nina, no less psychologically. “When one thinks of what one was at that sort of age, oneself!”
Bertha, however, appeared to feel that one might think of what one was at that sort of age too frequently, and offered her friend no encouragement to pursue this retrospective path.
Instead, she rose from her low seat on the terrace and remarked matter-of-factly that it was too cold to sit still for long.
“Let’s go and have a look at the chicks.”