“It depends, my lord.”
And this, a few hundred years earlier, would have been the natural and effective moment for the thumbscrews.
I do not wish to be understood as defending these uncomfortable appliances. They would never have been needed to elicit information from me, for I should have spent my nights inventing matter to confess in the daytime. I feel sure that I should have poured out such floods of confessions and retractations that if all Scotland had been one listening ear it could not have heard my tale. I am only wondering if, in the extracting of testimony from the common mind, the thumbscrew might not have been more necessary with some nations than with others.
Chapter V. We emulate the Jackdaw.
Invitations had been pouring in upon us since the delivery of our letters of introduction, and it was now the evening of our debut in Edinburgh society. Francesca had volunteered to perform the task of leaving cards, ordering a private victoria for the purpose, and arraying herself in purple and fine linen.
“Much depends upon the first impression,” she had said. “Miss Hamilton’s ‘party’ may not be gifted, but it is well-dressed. My hope is that some of our future hostesses will be looking from the second-story front-windows. If they are, I can assure them in advance that I shall be a national advertisement.”
It is needless to remark that as it began to rain heavily as she was leaving the house, she was obliged to send back the open carriage, and order, to save time, one of the public cabs from the stand in the Terrace.
“Would you mind having the lamiter, being first in line?” asked Susanna of Salemina, who had transmitted the command.
When Salemina fails to understand anything, the world is kept in complete ignorance.—Least of all would she stoop to ask a humble maidservant to translate the vernacular of the country; so she replied affably, “Certainly, Susanna, that is the kind we always prefer. I suppose it is covered?”