"Will you come if I send you one?"
"Oh but really it's too beautiful of you!" breathed the girl.
"You shall have a box; your brother shall bring you. They can't squeeze in a pin, I'm told; but I've kept a box, I'll manage it. Only if I do, you know, mind you positively come!" She sounded it as the highest of favours, resting her hand on Biddy's.
"Don't be afraid. And may I bring a friend—the friend with whom I'm staying?"
Miriam now just gloomed. "Do you mean Mrs. Dallow?"
"No, no—Miss Tressilian. She puts me up, she has got a flat. Did you ever see a flat?" asked Biddy expansively. "My cousin's not in London." Miriam replied that she might bring whom she liked and Biddy broke out to her brother: "Fancy what kindness, Nick: we're to have a box to-night and you're to take me!"
Nick turned to her a face of levity which struck her even at the time as too cynically free, but which she understood when the finer sense of it subsequently recurred to her. Mr. Dashwood interposed with the remark that it was all very well to talk about boxes, but that he didn't see how at that time of day the miracle was to be worked.
"You haven't kept one as I told you?" Miriam demanded.
"As you told me, my dear? Tell the lamb to keep its tenderest mutton from the wolves!"
"You shall have one: we'll arrange it," Miriam went on to Biddy.