Bertie’s sister entered the breakfast-room, and enquired of everybody how they had slept, and asked everybody with a cold if their cold was better, and passed the salt, and placed herself carefully between her brother and the Ostend-Plage Girl, whom she suspected of sirenic intentions. The Ostend-Plage Girl, who never passed salt, and who wore a soiled creation of white serge and light blue pom-poms, promptly upset the equilibrium of Bertie’s sister, by announcing: “I quite intend to fall in love with Vyvyan, don’t you, Aureole?”
“I believe he is going to mean something,” murmured Aureole.
Stuart grunted.
“What! no mackerel left again?” from the Disagreeable Female, whose name nobody ever seemed to know.
Letty offered hers: “I haven’t touched it yet; do, please, take it. I’m not hungry.” And Mrs. Percival looked archly at Sebastian: “Not hungry? dear me! now I wonder why that is!”
Mrs. Johnson exchanged significant glances with her husband. She had only been able to keep him from an open row with Sebastian, by frequent allusions to Letty’s loss of appetite:—“and what it would be like if you forbade her to see him, Matthew——” “So tactful of the fellow to come and plant himself under the same roof, directly after I’ve told him not to call so often, isn’t it?” but he restrained his smouldering wrath, nevertheless. Letty was his pet, and he hated to see her leaving her food; good food, that he had paid for.
The talk veered round again to Vyvyan; and the Cabbage-rose skittishly proposed making him an apple-pie bed: “We always used to have no end of that sort of fun when I stayed at Lyn House—Lord Burchester’s place, that is.” She broke off her reminiscences to throw the Earwig a solicitous: “Johnny, dearest, is no one looking after you?”
The Earwig mumbled, and spilt the milk. He was a very ancient and decrepit Earwig. And Ethel Wynne, who sat beside him, sprang up with an unnecessarily quick: “Oh, am I in your place? So sorry. Do come here and look after your husband yourself!”
The Ostend-Plage Girl broke into smothered giggles.
“My egg isn’t fresh,” said the Disagreeable Female. And looked relentlessly at Stuart; who afterwards privately relieved his feelings to Sebastian, by a prolonged outburst on the evils of boarding establishments: