"Now, let me see," said Lady Chaloner, "what are you goin' to have on your stall?"
"On mine?" said Mrs. Birkett, rather taken aback.
"Yes," said Lady Chaloner, "aren't you goin' to have a stall?"
"You see," said Mrs. Birkett, "I have not any of the things here that—er—I generally use for the purpose," and she thought regretfully of a big box at home which contained a sort of rolling stock of hideous articles that travelled, so to speak, between herself and her friends from one bazaar to another, and reappeared, a sort of symbolical merchandise, a currency in a nightmare, at all the fancy sales held in the neighbourhood of Leighton Ham.
"The only thing is," said Lady Chaloner, "it is rather a pity, because, bein' for the Church, people will expect you to sell, you know. Perhaps you could sell at somebody else's stall. Mine's full, I think," she added prudently. "Let me see," and her ladyship ran quickly over the names of the half a dozen young women who, in the most beguiling of costumes, were going to trip about and sell buttonholes to their partners of the evening before. Lady Chaloner's solid good sense and long habit of the world kept things that should be separate perfectly distinct; she did not for a moment contemplate Mrs. Birkett tripping about and selling buttonholes. "Perhaps Mrs. Samuels hasn't got her number complete," she said, not realising this time, the thing being a little more out of her field of vision, that Mrs. Samuels, who had been spending her time, energy, and even money, in trying to be friends with Lady Chaloner, might quite possibly be in the same attitude towards Mrs. Birkett, if thrust upon her, as Lady Chaloner was to herself.
"I daresay, yes," said Mrs. Birkett, with some misgiving, as she saw Mrs. Samuels further down the alley, standing with a London manager in the centre of a group who were laughing and talking round them.
"Let me see, Mrs. Samuels is goin' to have the tea, isn't she?"
"Yes, the refreshment stall," said Mrs. Birkett, referring to her list.
"And Lady Adela Prestige the fortune tellin'—and Princess Hohenschreien, what did she say she would do? Oh! I remember, the Café Chantant. What has she done about it, I wonder? Do you know anything about that?"
"I am afraid I don't," said Mrs. Birkett. This, indeed, was quite beyond her competence.