“I say, Cousin Frank, are you awake? I’ve been here for hours, dropping small stones on your head, so as to rouse you up. I daren’t make any noise, for they’re still jawing away inside and I was afraid they’d hear me. Could you struggle along a bit further away from the window? I’ll carry your chair.”
They found a nook behind the rose-bed which Priscilla held to be perfectly safe. Frank settled down on his chair. Priscilla, with her knees pulled up to her chin, sat on a cushion at his feet.
“Aunt Juliet hunted me off to bed at half-past nine,” she said. “Dastardly tyranny! And she sent Mrs. Geraghty to do my hair—not that she cared if my hair was never done, but so as to make sure that I really undressed. Plucky lot of good that was!”
The precaution had evidently been of no use at all; but neither Miss Lentaigne nor Mrs. Geraghty could have calculated on Priscilla’s roaming about the grounds in her dressing-gown.
“The reason of the tyranny,” said Priscilla, “was plain enough. Aunt Juliet was smoking a cigarette.”
“Good gracious!” said Frank. “I should never have thought your aunt smoked.”
“She doesn’t. She never did before, though she may take to it regularly now for a time. I simply told her that she oughtn’t to chew the end. No real smoker does; and I could see that she didn’t like the wads of tobacco coming off on her tongue. Besides, it was beastly waste of the cigarette. She chawed off quite as much as she smoked. You’d have thought she’d have been obliged to me for giving her the tip, but quite the contrary. She hoofed me off to bed.”
“But what has made her take to smoking?”
“She had to,” said Priscilla. “I don’t think she really likes it, but with her principles she simply had to. It’s part of what’s called the economic independence of women and she wants to dare the Prime Minister to put her in gaol. I don’t suppose he will, at least not unless she does something worse than that; but that’s what she hopes. You know, of course, that the Prime Minister is coming tomorrow.”
“It’s not the Prime Minister,” said Frank, “only Lord Torrington.”