"Really?" Lady Martin drawled the word out insolently, as though to indicate that the name of the young woman in question did not interest her. "She is not here to-day, I suppose?"
"No," said Toni, absent-mindedly, "she was not able to get off to-day."
"Get off?" Lady Martin pounced on the strange form of the admission. "She is ... er ... full of social engagements?"
Afterwards Toni thought it was the scent of the flowers which had made her feel hazy just then. Although she had an intuition that her interlocutor meant to be inquisitive, she had not the sense to turn the subject with a vague assent; and after a second's hesitation replied rather foolishly that her cousin's engagements were not in society.
"Indeed? But it is holiday time—surely Miss Gibbs is not teaching now?"
Mrs. Anstey, feeling to the full the insolence of this cross-examination, attempted to come to the rescue; but Lady Martin stood waiting so obviously for an answer that Toni felt constrained to reply.
"No, Lady Martin. My cousin is not a governess."
"No?" Lady Martin, who had the lust for cruelty inherent in all mean natures, pressed the point ruthlessly. "Then—I hardly see ... in the summer one does not work unless one is a private secretary or something of that sort; and I am sure your cousin"—with a pointed smile—"did not look in the very least like a private secretary!"
Suddenly Toni lost her head and her temper together.
"My cousin is no one's secretary, Lady Martin. She is in a shop—Brown and Evans, drapers, of Brixton; and she is not here to-day because Thursday is the early-closing day for the shops, and this is only Tuesday!"