“Not at all,” declared Gillian briskly. “There’s nothing like beginning with a little aversion.”
Magda smiled reminiscently.
“If you’d been present at our interview, you’d realise that ‘a little aversion’ is a cloying euphemism for the feeling exhibited by my late preserver.”
“What was he like, then?”
“At first, because I wouldn’t take the sal volatile—you know how I detest the stuff!—and sit still where he’d put me like a good little girl, he ordered me about as though I were a child of six. He absolutely bullied me! Then it apparently occurred to him to take my moral welfare in hand, and I should judge he considered that Jezebel and Delilah were positively provincial in their methods as compared with me.”
“Nonsense! If he didn’t know you, why should he suppose himself competent to form any opinion about you at all—good, bad, or indifferent?”
“I don’t know,” replied Magda slowly. Then, speaking with sudden defiance: “Yes, I do know! A pal of his had—had cared about me some time or other, and I’d turned him down. That’s why.”
“Oh, Magda!” There was both reproach and understanding in Gillian’s voice.
Magda shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, if he wanted to pay off old scores on his pal’s behalf, he succeeded,” she said mirthlessly.