"Rot! You may think you do, but you don't. You're much too hot-blooded to stick that kind of marriage long. I know I wouldn't. And it serves you right if you ever make a mess of it."
"I thought Sir Archibald only pitied me," said Mavis, in extenuation of her marriage.
"Pity! pity! He's a man, not a bloodless nincompoop," said Miss Toombs. "And it's you I have to thank for seeing him so often," she added, as her anger again flamed up.
"Sir Archibald?" asked Mavis.
"He sees me to talk about you," said Miss Toombs sorrowfully. "And he never looks twice at me. He doesn't even like me enough to ask me to go away for a week-end with him. I'm simply nothing to him, and that's the truth."
"I think you a dear, anyway. And I've got you a rise of a pound a week."
"What?"
Mavis repeated her information.
"That'll buy me some summer muslins I've long had my eye on, and one or two bits of jewellery. Then, perhaps, he'll look at me," declared Miss Toombs.
The next moment she caught sight of her reflection in Perrott's (the grocer's) window, at which she cried: