Victoria May Alice uttered a loud sniff:
“I was just a-finishing this here chapter, lidy—it’s so blamey dark on the landing. I’d got to such a beautiful part—where Sir ’Enery Marjorrybanks is a-telling of the lady’s-maid as her eyes is so magical and is just a-seein’ of poems in their liquid depths, and all that.... It give me a kind of nice hump the way they was a-goin’ hon——”
“What are you reading, Victoria May Alice?” Caroline held out her hand. “Let me see it.”
The smudgy little maid handed her the periodical:
“It’s Bow Bells, marm—what that rummy gent brings me—him what they calls Lovegood.”
She went and stood beside her chair as Caroline looked at the paper; and with long bony fingers, not very clean, the girl proceeded to do the honours:
“That’s the picture of Sir ’Enery a-kissin’ of the girl hunder the hoak-tree. She’s purtendin’ she don’t like it. I wonder why they always does that in high-class society. I kissed a ’airdresser once, and it was better than a lobster salad—but (sniff) that’s neither ’ere nor there.... I like them wonderful whiskers of Sir’’Enery Marjorrybanks—I like ’is name, too, it’s like crackin’ nuts—Marjorrybanks.”
“Marchbanks, Victoria!”
Victoria May Alice looked hard at the handsome lady before her, suspiciously:
“Garn, mem!” said she—“you’re coddin’.”