"Susan, look here. Look at your own letter. Goodness knows where you got all this grand old-fashioned language from. It's the sort of language they used when Lord Ruddington's great-grandmother wasn't a day older than you are now. But that isn't my point. What I want to know is why you write to Lord Ruddington in this letter about 'occasions' when you have met?"
"I know it sounds wrong, Miss," replied Susan, more humbly than ever. "But that was just the way it was in the book. Those were the very words."
"The book?" I echoed, bewildered.
"Yes, Miss. I copied it out of the old book that's been lying in the lumber-room ever since I came to Traxelby. Perhaps you haven't seen it, Miss?"
Light was breaking over me, but I couldn't make out the full truth till Susan went on:
"The back is torn off, Miss. It has a picture of a young lady in a short-waisted muslin frock looking very sad and writing at a table. There's a wicked little boy in the corner of the room with nothing on but wings, and a and arrow, just going to shoot the young lady. The book's called The Complete Letter-Writer."
It took all my self-control and all my solicitude for poor worried Susan to restrain me from laughing loud and long. But, after the first shock of comicality, I was soon steadied again by the hard facts which still rose up before me. At another time this clearing up of the mystery of Susan's Late Georgian grammar and Johnsonian vocabulary would have been droll past resistance. But Lord Ruddington's letter was lying on the table.
Happily the beckoning hands of Fortune had not spoiled Susan yet. The prospect of wealth and rank had confused her brains, but it had not dazzled her inmost, sound self or altered her sterling principles or shaken her out of her well-worn ways. The mistress-elect of Ruddington Towers and my social superior of the near future still addressed me with the simple, respectful openness for which I have always liked her so well. After I had sat I don't know how long, silently trying to work out a solution, she said for the third time:
"I knew it didn't sound right, Miss. I will tear it up and burn it. And perhaps ... when you're not too busy ... perhaps, Miss Gertrude, you would tell me what I ought to say."
"Of course, Susan, of course," I answered. "I've promised you already. But it isn't easy."