“Dear me!” exclaimed the Colonel, with exasperating mildness.
“And besides,” Lady Jane concluded, sticking up her aristocratic nose in wrath, “she’s distinctly plebeian!”
“I’m sorry, mother, but you’re quite mistaken,” said Lionel, looking up from his paper, and bending his brows. “She talks just as we do, and nobody could possibly tell that she didn’t belong to our set.”
Lady Jane stared at her eldest son in surprise. They were all three in the mess-room after luncheon. “My dear Lionel,” she retorted, with pitying scorn, “if you don’t know a lady when you see one, I really can’t teach you the difference, can I?”
“Miss Scott is a lady in every way,” Lionel answered, with a good deal of emphasis, and fixing his eyes on his mother’s in an odd way.
“Good heaven!” cried Lady Jane. “I believe you’re another of her victims!”
“I am going to marry Miss Scott in June,” Lionel said, rising suddenly, and looking down at her and his father—for he was very tall.
“What?” cried Lady Jane, her jaw dropping.
“What?” cried the Colonel, no longer mild.
And the walls of the mess-room echoed “what” in the name of the absent members of the family.