“What has he done that makes him impossible?”
“Oh, I really can’t give you the exact details; but they say all sorts of unpleasant things about him.”
“‘They say.’ We know who ‘they’ are—an unknown quantity, which, when inquired into, resolves itself into half a dozen old women of both sexes.”
“Unhappily everybody knows that he is in debt all over the neighbourhood.”
“He must be a remarkable man to have found a neighbourhood so trustful.”
“Oh, I suppose he pays a little on account from time to time, or he would not be able to go on anyhow; but really, now, Jack, you can’t expect me to be on intimate terms with a household of that kind. I am very glad to have those poor girls at my garden-parties, for they are pretty and tolerably well-behaved, though their frocks and hats are too dreadful. What did I tell you Lady Corisande Hawberk called those poor girls when she saw them here last summer, Claudia?”
“Lady Hartley’s burlesque troupe.”
“Yes, that was it—Lady Hartley’s burlesque troupe! They were all three dressed differently—and so fine—especially the two younger. The eldest is a shade more enlightened. One wore cheap black lace over apricot silk—you are a man, so you don’t know what cheap black lace means—and a Gainsborough hat. Another was in peach-coloured cotton—that papery, shiny cotton, which is meant to look like silk, with a straw sailor hat all over nodding peach-coloured poppies—and her parasol!—heavens, her parasol! bright scarlet cotton, and six feet high! Lady Corisande was immensely amused.”
“Is poverty so good a joke?” asked Vansittart, black as thunder.
“Oh, it wasn’t their poverty one laughed at. It was their childlike ignorance of our world and its ways. If they had all three worn clean white frocks and neat straw hats they would have looked charming. It was the effort to be in the height of fashion——”