"What?" Mrs. Russell would ask with an amused frown, and Angelica would have to stop and spell the word and be corrected.
For days they stayed in her head to torment her, those words, those sounds which she repeated after Mrs. Russell. They danced before her eyes, rang in her ears at night.
It was a horrible hour. Angelica couldn’t make any sort of counter-attack, couldn’t assert herself, could only go on, and make outrageous blunders, and humbly repeat the corrections.
Came a long French phrase, not one word of which she could manage. She stopped short.
"Go on!" said Mrs. Russell.
Angelica flew at the thing, desperately and recklessly. Mrs. Russell couldn’t stop laughing. She lay back on her pillows and covered her eyes with her hands.
"Oh, my dear! That’s really—— You mustn’t mind my laughing, will you?"
"I don’t," said Angelica.
But she did—she hated and dreaded that laughter with all her heart. If she had planned it carefully, Mrs. Russell couldn’t have devised a better method for subduing her.
Yet all her recollections of this nightmare of shame and distress were permeated by the mystic atmosphere that so enthralled her—the rose-shaded light, the nonchalant, red-haired lady in bed, the sweet smoke of the cigarettes; all the softness, the seclusion, the luxury, all the amazing fascination of a dream come true—except, of course, that she should have been in Mrs. Russell’s place.