It was the freckled original. The dark one, then, was the one with the hand. The freckled one rose in her esteem.
“But I can’t bear to think of you with a headache and nothing being done for it,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot. “Would a cup of strong black coffee—?”
Scrap said no more. She waited, motionless and dumb, till Mrs. Arbuthnot should remove her hand. After all, she couldn’t stand there all day, and when she went away she would have to take her hand with her.
“I do think,” said the freckled one, “that she wants nothing except quiet.”
And perhaps the freckled one pulled the one with the hand by the sleeve, for the hold on Scrap’s forehead relaxed, and after a minute’s silence, during which no doubt she was being contemplated—she was always being contemplated—the footsteps began to scrunch the pebbles again, and grew fainter, and were gone.
“Lady Caroline has a headache,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, re-entering the dining-room and sitting down in her place next to Mrs. Fisher. “I can’t persuade her to have even a little tea, or some black coffee. Do you know what aspirin is in Italian?”
“The proper remedy for headaches,” said Mrs. Fisher firmly, “is castor oil.”
“But she hasn’t got a headache,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“Carlyle,” said Mrs. Fisher, who had finished her omelette and had leisure, while she waited for the next course, to talk, “suffered at one period terribly from headaches, and he constantly took castor oil as a remedy. He took it, I should say, almost to excess, and called it, I remember, in his interesting way the oil of sorrow. My father said it coloured for a time his whole attitude to life, his whole philosophy. But that was because he took too much. What Lady Caroline wants is one dose, and one only. It is a mistake to keep on taking castor oil.”
“Do you know the Italian for it?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.