There had been talk of the marchesa finding a larger apartment.
“There is all this money to be spent,” she said with a laugh, “and honestly I don’t quite know how.”
“Do you want to go?” asked her grandmother cheerfully.
“Not I.”
“Nina hopes, if you do,” remarked Sylvia, looking up from knitting a sock, “that you will be very careful to take another crooked room; it’s lucky, she says.”
“I’ll have nothing more to do with Nina’s lucky theories,” said Teresa.
“Imagine, Mary,” she went on to Mrs Maxwell, who was lazily skimming an Italian newspaper, “on All Saints’ Day she brought us horrible biscuits made like cross-bones, and expected us to eat them! Biscuits of the dead, she called the dreadful things, and groaned all day over my want of devout feeling, when I couldn’t look at them.”
“I wish you hadn’t minded,” said Sylvia again, with some uneasiness.
Mrs Brodrick fidgeted.
“And the other day, instead of our Italian paper, she brought word that the man had sold his out, but that he assured me it didn’t matter, because there was nothing in it.”