"Better for herself, is she?" she said, "and is that all the thanks I get for keeping my post vacant, and living through days the weariness of which none may know. If Miss Primrose Mainwaring is doing better for herself in the country she is welcome to stay there. The post is a good one, a light and an easy one, and I can get many another lass to fill it."
"I think, ma'am," said Mrs. Dredge, whose face had grown wonderfully smooth and pleasant of late, "that the dear girls will all be in town this week, and most likely Miss Primrose will come to pay you a visit. Oh, they are nice girls, pretty, elegant girls, just the kind of girls my good man would like to have been papa to. I can't help shivering, even now when I think of that wicked man Dove, and what a state he put dear little Daisy into."
"If praises of the Mainwarings is to begin," answered Mrs. Mortlock in her tartest voice, "what I say is, let me retire. It's all very well for them as has right to talk well of the absent, but when one of the absent ones is neglecting her duty the lady who has weak eyes feels it. Miss Slowcum, ma'am, have you any objection to moving with me into the drawing-room? I can lend you that pattern you admired so much for tatting if you read me the latest gossip from the evening papers, ma'am."
Mrs. Mortlock rose from her chair, and, accompanied by Miss Slowcum, left the room. Miss Slowcum took a ladylike interest in all kinds of needlework, and the desire to possess the tatting pattern overcame her great reluctance to read aloud to the very tart old lady.
Mrs. Mortlock placed herself in the most comfortable arm-chair the room afforded, and having secured her victim, began instantly to tyrannize over her.
"Now, Miss Slowcum, read up chirrupy and cheerful please. None of your drawling, by way of genteel voice, for me—I like my gossip crisp. I will say this of that dear girl Primrose Mainwaring, that she did her gossip crisp."
"You really are a very unaccountable person, Mrs. Mortlock," replied Miss Slowcum. "You begin by abusing Primrose Mainwaring, and then you praise her in the most absurd manner. I hope the refined reading of a cultivated lady is not to be compared to the immature utterances of a school-girl. If that is so, Mrs. Mortlock, even for the sake of the tatting pattern, I cannot consent to waste my words on you."
"Oh, my good creature," said Mrs. Mortlock, who by no means wished to be left to solitude and herself, "you read in a very pretty style of your own—obsolete it may be—h'm—I suppose we must expect that—mature it certainly is; yes, my dear, quite mature. If I praise Primrose Mainwaring, and a good girl she was when she was with me—yes, a good, painstaking girl, thankful for her mercies—it's no disparagement to you, Miss Slowcum. You're mellow, my dear, and you can't help being mellow, and Primrose Mainwaring is crisp, and she can't help being crisp. Oh, goodness gracious me! what sound is that falls on my ear?"
"An old friend's voice, I hope, Mrs. Mortlock," said a pleasant girlish tone, and Primrose Mainwaring herself bent down over the old lady and kissed her.
Notwithstanding all her grumbling Mrs. Mortlock had taken an immense fancy to Primrose. She returned her embrace warmly, and even took her hand and squeezed it.