“What’s got into her?” asked the ladies. “Her naiveté was bad enough, but her snobbishness is insufferable!”
Marjorie had never seen a home just like the Barrington’s. It reminded her of the Ancient Chattellarium, and struck her as being a curious place in which to live. There weren’t two chairs that matched in the whole house, and the black rugs and hangings she found very depressing. Moreover, the rooms bore names as strange as their furnishings, and she had no idea what her hostess meant by the Cuddlery or the Tiffinaria.
Mrs. Barrington entertained easily. She did not stand in the centre of the drawing-room, beneath the chandelier, and greet her guests with flattering though repetitive phrases. In the first place, there wasn’t, properly speaking, a drawing-room. In the second, there was no chandelier. What light there was, came from half a dozen shaded sconces, and a pair of Roman lamps. There were no pictures on the wall. At least, Marjorie did not call them pictures. They were scratchy drawings representing Chinamen engaged in such profitless occupations as contemplating the tonsils of a large-mouthed dragon, or leaning thoughtfully upon a naked blade—naked, that is, save for the head that clothed the point of it. She had never seen their like, before, and thoroughly disapproved of them.
Mrs. Barrington did not stand in the drawing-room at all, but wandered about with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other, and seemed intensely surprised to see the people she was entertaining.
“Well,” she greeted more than one guest, “fancy your trotting away out here. Are you with anyone or did you come alone?”
With the exception of Mr. Sullivan and the Carmichael girls, they were strangers to Marjorie, as, indeed, many of them were to their hostess.
“Who is the young blood so effectively burgling the cellarette?” she would ask her husband. Or, “Toddles, tell me quickly, is that girl in blue some one I ought to know?”
Supper was spread in the Tiffinaria and eaten all over the house. Marjorie was inexpressibly shocked to hear a nice looking young man call to his partner,
“You wait upstairs, old dear, and I’ll bring up the victuals. We can mangle them on Hebe’s dressing table.”
“Peacherina!” answered the girl, throwing her slipper at him. “What’s on the menu, this evening?”