"You must have looked a treat!"
"Yes, I do think I looked rather nice," Vicky agreed wholeheartedly.
"Did you shoot anything?"
"Oh yes, very nearly!"
"That's where you take after your father, ducky," said Ermyntrude. "I never knew such a man for sport! Three times he went to Africa, big-game shooting. That was before he met me, of course."
"Well, if you call missing rabbits taking after her father, I don't," remarked Wally. "As far as I can make out, her father never missed anything. It's a great pity he didn't, if you ask me, for if he had perhaps I shouldn't have had to live in a house full of bits of wild animals. I dare say there are people who like keeping their umbrellas in elephants' legs, and having gongs framed in hippo tusks, and tables made out of rhinoceros hides, and leopard skins chucked over their sofas, and heads stuck up all round the walls, but I'm not one of them, and I've never pretended that I was. You might as well live in the Natural History Museum, and be done with it."
"And the Bawtrys are coming too!" said Ermyntrude, who had paid not the least attention to this speech. "That'll make us ten, all told."
"I think Alan would like to come to the party," murmured Vicky.
Ermyntrude folded her lips for a moment. "Well, he'll have to like," she said. "I don't mean that I've got anything against him, nor his sister either, if it comes to that, but have Harold White here with the Derings and the Bawtrys I won't, and that's flat!"
"Oh, I hate Mr. White!" agreed Vicky.