"And Flora—send Flora to me. Is she asleep somewhere?"
She faced me with an acid grimace and shrug.
"You see how it is here, Mr. Lightnut," she grumbled querulously; "but you understand!"
Understand! By Jove, yes—I thought I did! I could see that the fellow was just sullen under the too free and easy assumptions of a guest from whom little had been experienced in the way of an occasional douceur. And dashed if I blamed him!
But I murmured some jolly rubbish, hoping every instant that Wilkes would come and lead me away.
"That's the way with them all here, from the housekeeper down," she went on gloomily. "They take advantage of the fact that the mistress of the house is abroad and the master absorbed and busy." Her voice quickened sharply: "Then do you think they care two pins about the authority of a silly girl who has been allowed to grow up untrained and ignorant of the first a b c of anything practical?"
I felt my face tingling.
"See here—Oh, dash it all!" I protested. "That's not fair, you know!"
"Fair?" She bit the word out of the air and just glared at me. "Why, they know she's a fool!"
I opened my mouth two or three times; then swallowed helplessly and grew red. Somehow, it came back to me—a time when I was a little boy and my nurse had been so shocked when I said "shucks!" I remembered how that night she read to me a tract about swear words and told me how when I grew up to be a big man, I would have to choose whether I was ever going to learn to swear or not. She said that if I didn't choose right, a day would come when I would be—oh, so sorry!