She came back from these speculations to the reality of her sister's voice, reiterating her question as to where the visitors found place, and she answered, still smiling:
"It is a great big room, Tild, twice as big as the drawing-room at home—no—bigger still, and twenty people could sit in it without crowding."
"Goodness gracious!" ejaculated Matilda; "it must be grand."
"You see, you are such an old goose, Matilda. You think the whole world must be like Bindon's Green, although I have told you over and over again that other places, and other grades of life, are different, but you and Mabel and Fred and Bert, and the whole crew of you, measure everything with your own tiny measure. You make me gasp at your outlook sometimes."
Matilda bridled—and Katherine went on.
"Lady Garribardine's house does not seem to be a bit grand to her, nor to any of the people who come there. They are not conscious of it; it is just everyday to them, although some of them live in quite small houses themselves and aren't at all rich. She has two cousins—elderly ladies, who live in a tiny flat—but oh! the difference in it to Mabel's villa! I had to take them a message last week and waited in their mite of a drawing-room—it was exquisitely clean and simple, and they are probably poorer than we are."
Matilda felt too ruffled to continue this conversation; she always hated the way Katherine argued with her; she wanted to get back to the far more interesting subject of carpets and curtains and arrangements in the rooms of Lady Garribardine's house. Numbers of the people in her serials, of course, were supposed to own such places, and she had often seen bits of them on the stage, but until she found Katherine really lived now in one, somehow she had never believed in them as living actualities, or rather their reality had not been brought home to her. So she questioned Katherine, and soon had an accurate description of her ladyship's bedroom, and the rest of the house, then she got back to the happenings of her sister's day.
"Well, when you have got up there, you take down orders, and then?"
"I sort everything that has come by the post and mark on the envelopes how I am to answer them, and I sometimes read her the papers aloud if her eyes are tired."
"Yes?"