It isn't!
It's just typical.
Is there any one thing in any one ladies' club to differentiate it from its sister establishment—especially in the canteen?
I will pay one year's town subscription to any woman knowing, of course, the difference between husks and food, who will honestly declare that her heart has not plumped to her boots after a spur-on-the-moment invitation to a man to lunch or dine at her club.
By spur-on-the-moment I mean when she has not had the time to negotiate with the cook, via the head waiter.
You do not need the menu to tell you that plaice is here your portion; or a lightning glance to ascertain that the exact number of your prunes is six, and that of your guest half a dozen; or just a sip of your coffee—well! there you begin to talk feverishly and to press liqueurs and cigarettes upon the suffering guest.
But to come back to the club tea-room.
"My dear," Susan Hetth was saying, jangling with the best, and pitching her voice so that it literally, though slangily, beat the band, "I really think, considering your position and recent bereavement, that you should wear——"
"Please be quiet, Auntie," said Leonie, who in a grey and pale mauve confection looked like a field of statice against a pearl-grey sky. "I came here to talk about you, not clothes. You see I want to tell you how I have settled things before I sail."
Her aunt fretted with a teaspoon, and spoke in the absurd peevish way which had been so attractive at seventeen.