If they had asked Damaris about the myth, she would have told them everything quite simply and truthfully. This would have cleared up the mist but spoilt the feeling of wrong-doing.
Lady Thistleton was large and recumbent and averse to sight-seeing, but after a heart-to-heart talk with her daughters had seen to it that Damaris had no time for moping.
Damaris went here, there and everywhere; played tennis; paid duty-calls, as you must when somebody extends her wing-feathers as shelter; acted in charades; attended concerts; and was thoroughly miserable.
Jane Coop was miserable too; so was the bulldog, and, through a certain unconfessed and indefinable vigilance they both felt called upon to exercise in behalf of their beloved mistress, were distinctly nervy.
"Drat the men!" had said the maid, giving pithy verbal expression to the ragged state of her nerves as she cut the stalks of the beautiful flowers which came daily without name or message. The dog's method of expressing himself was somewhat more violent; it consisted of the sudden seizure between his great teeth of the posterior portion of the nether garments of low-caste males, white or coloured.
You could almost tell the status of the male bipeds by casting a discreet eye upon their raiment, and as there was not a muzzle in Egypt big enough to fit the dog, it had ended in him being led or chained in polite society.
Damaris's table was next that of the Thistletons, who, with a vague memory maybe of their duty towards their neighbour as instilled on Sundays into their rebellious infantile heads, chatted brightly to right and to left of them at meals.
Full of the milk of human kindness, they allowed it to overflow into their writhing neighbours' jugs.
They broke through the glacial atmosphere which surrounds the Britisher's breakfast-table; newspaper propped against jam-pot was no barrier; their gladsome invitations or suggestions, dammed for the moment, would rise at last level with the paper's edge to trickle down the other side and mingle with the eggs and bacon, porridge, kidneys, or whatever trifle the plate might contain.
They read out scraps of news from the morning paper; they read out bits of home news from their stacks of correspondence, written for the most part on eight pages and in the sprawling, uncontrolled script of the woman who has nothing but trivialities with which to fill her day.