“Any Fool could have told I was in the garden. Any Fool might have known I was in the garden. If I wasn’t in the garden, then where the Devil was I? Eh? Where else could I be? Of course I was in the garden, and what you wanted was to hunt me down and make a fool of me. And look at me! Look, I say! Look at my hands!”
Lady Harman regarded the lord of her being and hesitated before she answered. She knew what she had to say would enrage him, but she had come to a point in their relationship when a husband’s good temper is no longer a supreme consideration. “You’ve had plenty of time to wash them,” she said.
“Yes,” he shouted. “And instead I kept ’em to show you. I stayed out here to see the last of that crew for fear I might run against ’em in the house. Of all the infernal old women——”
His lips were providentially deprived of speech. He conveyed his inability to express his estimate of Lady Beach-Mandarin by a gesture of despair.
“If—if anyone calls and I am at home I have to receive them,” said Lady Harman, after a moment’s deliberation.
“Receiving them’s one thing. Making a Fool of yourself——”
His voice was rising.
“Isaac,” said Lady Harman, leaning forward and then in a low penetrating whisper, “Snagsby!”
(It was the name of the great butler.)
“Damn Snagsby!” hissed Sir Isaac, but dropping his voice and drawing near to her. What his voice lost in height it gained in intensity. “What I say is this, Ella, you oughtn’t to have brought that old woman out into the garden at all——”