“What is Mr. Levi doing then?” queried Mrs. Baker faintly. And Letty trumpeted forth that Sebastian had written a book.
“Oh, but then he must have quite wonderful brains; now I like that; yes, I like people to have brains... dear things ...” and Mrs. Baker nodded and smiled several times to show her tolerance, while, in the same key, Mrs. Johnson carried on:
“Yes, I must say that personally I don’t object to even a woman with a man’s brain; we hear a lot about it spoiling her charm, but I think a girl can be both feminine and intellectual, don’t you, Milly?”
Mrs. Baker said: “Yes, indeed, and sporting too. They say that hockey is bad for the figure, but I like a fine open-air girl ... dear healthy things. Though of course I admire the dainty type as well, and the clever woman who wears glasses.”
And Mrs. Johnson wound up this display of the boundless broadness of mind existing among Turnham Green matrons, by a magnificent declaration that she believed a girl could be brainy without wearing glasses! There is no knowing to what Rabelaisian extent the conversation might have widened, had not Luke burst in, with a gruff demand for tea; and dragging in his wake the fifteen-year-old flapper from the boarding-house next door:
—“Don’t look at me, Mrs. J. I’m sky blue with cold; this horrid kid kept me standing hours and hours listening to a stupid old man on a tub at a street-corner. I declare, I wish I’d gone biking with Tommy Cox; he asked me to come on his carrier.”
“Pity you didn’t, then,” growled Luke, eyes fixed on Sebastian.
Jinny tossed back the curly brown hair which lapped her shoulders; an enormous black bow stood out pertly from the nape of her neck. She wore a blue woolly tam-o’-shanter, a string of green glass beads round her bare throat, a striped flannel shirt, a green serge skirt, very short to show her high brown boots, and a brooch of her school badge and motto.
“I say, may I stop to tea?” she asked of Mrs. Johnson, ignoring Luke.
“Certainly, Jinny; it won’t be ready till five o’clock,—but some of us can wait in the dining-room.”