“Why should we pity you? How can Mrs. Headway hurt such a person as you?” he asked.
Lady Demesne cast about. “It hurts me to hear her voice.”
“Her voice is very liquid.” He liked his word.
“Possibly. But she’s horrible!”
This was too much, it seemed to Waterville; Nancy Beck was open to criticism, and he himself had declared she was a barbarian. Yet she wasn’t horrible. “It’s for your son to pity you. If he doesn’t how can you expect it of others?”
“Oh but he does!” And with a majesty that was more striking even than her logic his hostess moved to the door.
Waterville advanced to open it for her, and as she passed out he said: “There’s one thing you can do—try to like her!”
She shot him a woeful glance. “That would be—worst of all!”
VIII
George Littlemore arrived in London on the twentieth of May, and one of the first things he did was to go and see Waterville at the Legation, where he mentioned that he had taken for the rest of the season a house at Queen Anne’s Gate, so that his sister and her husband, who, under the pressure of diminished rents, had let their own town residence, might come up and spend a couple of months with him.