The protuberant eyes stared at Kitty. Lady Maria said: “Oh, yes! Met you somewhere, I believe, Miss Charing. Staying with Lady Buckhaven, aren’t you? Lovely weather, isn’t it? I say, Westruther, do you see the Angleseys are back in town? Just met Anglesey, with his girls. My dear Camille, what is holding us up for so long? Some fool trying to lionize, I daresay, with a badly broke horse! Oh, now we are off! Goodbye! Happy to meet you again some day, Miss— can’t remember names!”
Mr. Westruther allowed his pair to have their heads a little, and as they were on the fret Kitty was whisked off before she could reply to this brusque speech. She said, in a tone of strong displeasure: “What very odd manners, to be sure!”
“You need not regard her: all the Annerwicks are famed for their rudeness,” responded Mr. Westruther. “They are convinced, you see, that they are vastly superior to the rest of mankind, and so have no need to waste civility.”
“I am astonished that Camille should be so often in her company,” Kitty remarked, wrinkling her brow. “He escorted her to the play last night, you know: I saw him, for I was there with Freddy, and the Legerwoods. It is quite impossible that he should like her! But they must be upon excessively friendly terms for her to call him Camille in that odious way! It doesn’t seem to me at all the thing.”
“It should perhaps be explained to you that Lady Maria is a very rich woman.”
“That is what Freddy said, but I will not allow it to be true that Camille is a fortune-hunter!”
He was amused. “What a high flight!”
“It is odious, Jack! Surely you must perceive that!”
“Not at all. Think of the offers you yourself received when it became known you were an heiress!”
She coloured. “Indeed, I thought them odious too!”