‘Perhaps that isn’t quite the word,’ said Laura, ‘though I believe it’s a very good way of approaching them.’ And then she paused, teapot in hand, her eyes on Sally’s face. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you know you’re the most utterly beautiful thing?’
Whereupon Sally started, for this was the way Mrs. Luke had begun with her, and said quickly, even as she had said then, ‘But I can’t ’elp it.’
‘Help it?’ echoed Laura, astonished.
‘People begins,’ said Sally anxiously, ‘with “Oh my, ain’t you beautiful,” and ends with bein’ angry. It ain’t as if I could ’elp it,’ she said, looking up at her new friend with eyes in which tears were gathering, for it would be more than she could bear on her empty stomach—she had had no food since her breakfast in Mr. Thorpe’s car—if she too were going to be angry with her.
Really such an extraordinary piece of good fortune as this had never yet come Laura’s way.
§
Now was Sally shovelled up by chance from the bottom of the social ladder to the top, for Laura was the spinster daughter of a duke. He was so aged that, by sheer going on living, everything he had ever done, good and bad, had been forgotten, and at last he had become an object of universal respect. Ninety-three next birthday; a great age. And his eldest son, the prospective duke, was sixty-five,—a great age too for anything that is still prospective. He was a marquis, Sally learned with surprise presently, when she was having her tea and Laura, who perceived she needed soothing, was trying to distract her by telling her about her relations; for she failed to understand why he shouldn’t be a duke. Pinners produced Pinners; why not dukes dukes?
But Laura said these things couldn’t be explained, and hurried on.
The old duke had married three times, and Laura was the product of what the neat-phrased French would call the third bed. All the beds, first, second, and third, had long vanished, and of the third, which had been very fruitful, Laura, and her brother Charles, and her married sister Terry, were the only surviving traces. The second bed had been barren; the first had provided the heir, and three ancient ladies old enough to be Laura’s mothers, who were scattered over England in varying degrees of resignation, one being the widow of a bishop, another the widow of a Cabinet Minister, and the third not yet the widow of a club man and expert bridge-player, who never came home till next day.
‘Why don’t ’e?’ asked Sally, manners seeming to demand that she should say something when, for an instant, her friend paused.