Lady Emily stifled a despairing yawn. Not a word had she been able to say about her Woodbastwick cows, which she was inwardly comparing with Allan's black muzzled Jerseys, grazing on the other side of the sunk fence. Heartfelt was her gratitude to Mrs. Mornington when that lady suddenly wheeled round from a confidential talk with the Vicar and interrupted Mrs. Roebuck's journey across the Cordilleras by an inquiry about the Suffolk branches of the Guild for supplying warm and comfortable raiment to the deserving poor.
"I hope you have a branch in your neighbourhood," she said.
"Yes, indeed we have. I am a slave to the Guild all the winter. One can't make flannel petticoats and things in summer, you know."
"I can," retorted Mrs. Mornington, decisively.
"What, on a broiling day in August! when the very sight of flannel puts one in a fever?"
"I am not so impressionable. The things are wanted in October, and July and August are quite late enough for getting them ready."
"I subscribe to these institutions," Mrs. Roebuck remarked languidly. "I never work for them. Life isn't long enough."
"Then you never have the right kind of feeling about your poorer fellow-creatures," said Mrs. Mornington. "It is the doing something for them, using one's own hand and eye and thought for the poor toiling creatures, sacrificing some little leisure and some little fad to making them more comfortable—it is that kind of thing which brings the idea of that harder world home to one."
"Ah, how nice it is of you dear ladies to sacrifice yourselves like that; but you couldn't do it after a June and July in London. If you had seen what a poor creature I looked when we took our seats in the club train for Homburg——"
Mrs. Mornington tucked her arm under Lady Emily's and walked her away.