“Badly!” echoed the wrathful mother. “I will leave you to judge. It was done here, quite under my own roof. You know Miss Wallaby volunteered her services, and went down into the Retired Licensed Victuallers’ Division of Surrey to electioneer for Sir Watkyn. Do you know, I never suspected anything. And then Miss Timby-Hucks, she went down also, but they rather cold-shouldered her, and she came back, and she told me things, and still I wouldn’t believe it. Well then—three weeks ago—my Evening At Home—you were here—the Wallabys came as large as life, and that scheming young person manoeuvred about until she got herself alone with Eustace and my Ermyntrude, and then she told her a scene she had witnessed during her recent election experiences. There was a meeting for Sir Watkyn at some place, I can’t recall the name, and there were a good many of the other side there, and they hooted and shouted, and raised disturbance, until at last there was one speaker they would not hear at all. All this that girl told Ermyntrude seriously, and as if she were overflowing with indignation. And then she came to the part where the speaker stood his ground and tried to make himself heard, and the crowd yelled louder than ever, and still he doggedly persisted—and then someone threw a large vegetable marrow, soft and very ripe, and it hit that speaker just under the ear, and burst all over him!”
“Ha-ha-ha!” I ejaculated. “The vegetable marrow in politics is new—full of delightful possibilities and seeds—wonder it has never been thought of before.”
“Yes,” said Mrs Albert, with a sigh. “Ermyntrude also thought it was funny. She has a very keen sense of humour—quite too keen. She laughed, too!”
“And why not?” I asked.
“Why not?” demanded Mrs Albert, with shining eyes. “Because the story had been told just to trap her into laughing—because—because the speaker upon whom that unhappy vegetable marrow exploded was—Eustace Hump!”
Containing Thoughts upon the Great Unknown, to which are added Speculations upon her Hereafter
It is not often that I find the time to take part in Mrs Albert Grundy’s Thursdays—the third and fifth Thursdays of each month, from 4 to 6.30 P.M.—but on a certain afternoon pleasant weather and the sense of long-accrued responsibility drew me to Fernbank.
It was really very nice, after one got there. Perhaps it would have been less satisfactory had escape from the drawing-room been a more difficult matter. Inside that formal chamber, with its blinds down-drawn to shield the carpet from the sun, the respectable air hung somewhat heavily about the assembled matronhood of Brompton and the Kensingtons. The units in this gathering changed from time to time—for Mrs Albert’s circle is a large and growing one—but the effect of the sum remained much the same. The elderly ladies talked about the amiability and kindliness of the Duchess of Teck; and argued the Continental relationships of the Duchesses of Connaught and Albany, first into an apparently hopeless tangle of burgs and hausens and zollerns and sweigs, then triumphantly out again into the bright daylight of well-ordered and pellucid genealogy. The younger wives spoke in subdued voices of more juvenile Princesses on the lower steps of the throne, with occasional short-winged flights across the North Sea in imaginative search of a suitable bride for the then unwedded Duke of York, if an importation should be found to be necessary—about which opinions might in all loyalty differ. The few young girls who sat dutifully here beside their mammas or married sisters talked of nothing at all, but smiled confusedly and looked away whenever another’s glance, caught theirs—and, I daresay, thought with decent humility upon Marchionesses.