“Lunch!” he cried. “Why, it’s eight!”
“I met—some people. I met Agatha Alimony. I have a perfect right to go out to lunch——”
“You met a nice crew I’ll bet. But that don’t account for your being out to eight, does it? With all the confounded household doing as it pleases!”
“I went on—to see the borders at Hampton Court.”
“With her?”
“Yes,” said Lady Harman....
It wasn’t what she had meant to happen. It was an inglorious declension from her contemplated pose of dignified assertion. She was impelled to do her utmost to get away from this lie she had uttered at once, to eliminate Agatha from the argument by an emphatic generalization. “I’ve a perfect right,” she said, suddenly nearly breathless, “to go to Hampton Court with anyone I please, talk about anything I like and stay there as long as I think fit.”
He squeezed his thin lips together for a silent moment and then retorted. “You’ve got nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. You’ve got to do your duty like everybody else in the world, and your duty is to be in this house controlling it—and not gossiping about London just where any silly fancy takes you.”
“I don’t think that is my duty,” said Lady Harman after a slight pause to collect her forces.
“Of course it’s your duty. You know it’s your duty. You know perfectly well. It’s only these rotten, silly, degenerate, decadent fools who’ve got ideas into you——” The sentence staggered under its load of adjectives like a camel under the last straw and collapsed. “See?” he said.