She motioned him to sit down by her side.
“I’ll explain,” she said. “You know we’re all expected to know something about everything nowadays, and it’s such a bore reading up things. I’m going to compile a little volume of definitions. I shall sell it at a guinea a copy, pay all my debts, and become quite respectable again.”
Deyes shook his head. His attitude was scarcely sympathetic.
“My dear Lady Peggy, what nonsense!” he declared. “Respectable, indeed! I call it positively pandering to the middle classes!”
Lady Peggy looked doubtful.
“It is a horrid word, isn’t it?” she admitted, “but it would be lovely to make some money. Of course, I haven’t absolutely decided how to spend it yet. It does seem rather a waste, doesn’t it, to pay one’s debts, but think of the luxury of feeling one could do it if one wanted to!”
“There’s something in that,” Deyes admitted. “But an encyclopædia! My dear Lady Peggy, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve got one somewhere, I know. It came in a van, and it took two of the men to unload it.”
Lady Peggy laughed softly.
“Oh! I don’t mean that sort, of course,” she declared. “I mean just a little gilt-edged text book, bound in morocco, you know, with just those things in it we’re likely to run up against. Radium, for instance. Now every one’s talking about radium. Do you know what radium is?”