“Yes,” he nodded—“it makes me quite giddy when I smoke a pipe.”
A knock at the door—and the little drudge skipped in and shut it again. She strode down the room on tip-toe to Caroline:
“Please, lidy—here’s that rummy gent as speaks like them beautiful play-actors. He’s waitin’ to see you very partic’lar.” She giggled. “He’s such a funny gentleman! Excuse my laughin’, mum, but he is that hodd and ridic’lous! When I opened the door he says, says he: ‘Hail, lugubrious smudgy serving-wench!’ says he.” She uttered a sniff, and cocked her head thoughtfully: “I expect he’s a poet or that sort of party. Jimmy, what a rum tailor he has! But if you ask me, mum, he knows how to spell hungry. I knows a man’s eyes when he’s short of his victuals. I ought ter.” Sniff. “I do love the the-ayter. They talks so beautiful—just as if words had meanin’ in them. Not a bit like real people——”
“May I ask what the gentleman is doing, meanwhile?” asked Caroline drily.
The girl leaned forward, and added confidentially behind the back of her hand:
“He’s on the mat.”
She jerked her thumb at the door.
Caroline shifted uneasily in her chair:
“I wish you would call gentlemen by their names, Victoria May Alice,” she said irritably. “Do you mean Mr. Eustace Lovegood?”
“That’s ’im,” said Victoria May Alice.