"Excessively clever," Miss Felicia continued.
—Without doubt the dear thing was finely worked up!—
"And, though I hardly like to make such accusation, none too scrupulous in her methods. She leads you on with a number of irrelevant comments and questions, until you find she's extracted from you a whole host of things you never meant to say. She is far too inquisitive—too possessive."
Miss Felicia ended on an almost violent note.
"Yes, Henrietta has a tiresome little habit of having been there first," Damaris said, a touch of weariness in her tone remembering past encounters.
Miss Felicia, caught by that warning tone, patted her niece's rather undiscoverable knee—undiscoverable because still covered by a heavy fur-lined driving coat—lovingly, excitedly.
"If you choose to believe her, darling," she cried, "which I, for one, emphatically don't."
Following which ardent profession of faith, or rather of scepticism, Miss Felicia attempted to treat the subject broadly. She soared to mountain-tops of social and psychological astuteness; but only to make hasty return upon her gentler self, deny her strictures, and snatch at the skirts of vanishing Christian charity.
"Men aren't so easily led away," she hopefully declared. "Nor can I think Mrs. Frayling so irresistible to each and all as she wishes one to imagine. She must magnify the number and, still more, the permanence of her conquests. No doubt she has been very much admired. I know she was lovely. I saw her once ages ago, at Tullingworth. Dearest Charles," the words came softly, as though her lips hesitated to pronounce them in so trivial a connection—"asked me to call on her as I was staying in the neighbourhood. She had a different surname then, by the way, I remember."
"Henrietta has had four in all—counting in her maiden name, I mean."