“Yes, it’s yours—just exactly yours; and I think it’s odious,” she insisted.
“I never saw such a young lady for discussing things! Has some one had the impudence to go before you?” Lord Lambeth asked.
“It’s not the going before me I object to,” said Bessie; “it’s their pretending they’ve a right to do it—a right I should grovellingly recognise.”
“I never saw such a person, either, for not ‘recognising,’ let alone for not ‘grovelling.’ Every one here has to grovel to somebody or to something—and no doubt it’s all beastly. But one takes the thick with the thin, and it saves a lot of trouble.”
“It makes a lot of trouble, by which I mean a lot of ugliness. It’s horrid!” Bessie maintained.
“But how would you have the first people go?” the young man asked. “They can’t go last, you know.”
“Whom do you mean by the first people?”
“Ah, if you mean to question first principles!” said Lord Lambeth.
“If those are your first principles no wonder some of your arrangements are horrid!” she cried, with a charming but not wholly sincere ferocity. “I’m a silly chit, no doubt, so of course I go last; but imagine what Kitty must feel on being informed that she’s not at liberty to budge till certain other ladies have passed out!”
“Oh I say, she’s not ‘informed’!” he protested. “No one would do such a thing as that.”