“Ah, that I’m afraid I don’t. However, she would know. You can ask her.”
“But she hasn’t got a headache,” repeated Mrs. Wilkins, who was struggling with the maccaroni. “She only wants to be let alone.”
They both looked at her. The word shovel crossed Mrs. Fisher’s mind in connection with Mrs. Wilkins’s actions at that moment.
“Then why should she say she has?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Because she is still trying to be polite. Soon she won’t try, when the place has got more into her—she’ll really be it. Without trying. Naturally.”
“Lotty, you see,” explained Mrs. Arbuthnot, smiling to Mrs. Fisher, who sat waiting with a stony patience for her next course, delayed because Mrs. Wilkins would go on trying to eat the maccaroni, which must be less worth eating than ever now that it was cold; “Lotty, you see, has a theory about this place—”
But Mrs. Fisher had no wish to hear any theory of Mrs. Wilkins’s.
“I am sure I don’t know,” she interrupted, looking severely at Mrs. Wilkins, “why you should assume Lady Caroline is not telling the truth.”
“I don’t assume—I know,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“And pray how do you know?” asked Mrs. Fisher icily, for Mrs. Wilkins was actually helping herself to more maccaroni, offered her officiously and unnecessarily a second time by Francesca.