'You can turn round now—quite safe. Sophia's out of range. Poor Sophia!' After a little pause, 'Of course you know Stonor?'
'Why, of course.'
'Oh, well, my distinguished cousin used not to be so hard to get hold of—not in the old days when we were seeing so much of your father.'
'That must have been when I was in the schoolroom—wasn't it?'
He turned suddenly and looked at her. 'I'd forgotten. You know Geoffrey, and you don't like him. I saw that once before.'
'Once before?' she echoed.
He reminded her of the time she hurried away from Ulland House to Bishopsmead.
'I wasn't deceived,' he said, with his look of smiling malice. 'You didn't care two pins about your Cousin Mary and her influenza.'
Vida moved her expressionless face a little to the right. 'I can see Sophia. But she's listening to the speech;' and Vida herself, with something of an effort, seemed now to be following the sordid experiences of a girl that the speaker had befriended some years before. It was through this girl, the mauve matron said, that she herself had come into touch with the abject poor. She took a big barrack of a house in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood, and it became known that there she received and helped both men and women. 'I sympathized with the men, but it was the things the women told me that appalled me. They were too bad to be entirely believed, but I wrote them down. They haunted me. I investigated. I found I had no excuse for doubting those stories.'
'This woman's a find,' Vida whispered to the chairman.