CHAPTER XXV
| "I have left you behind In the path of the past; With the white breath of flowers, With the best of God's hours, I have left you at last." |
Dora Sigerson.
Mrs. Carew was in a state of discontent which amounted almost to anger.
"I knew such kind of things were bound to happen," she grumbled fiercely, "if she joined in with a girl like that Miss Bellairs. I have never held and I never will hold with young ladies having men to tea in their bedrooms."
"Why don't you just tell her so?" suggested her helpmate from his customary entrenched position in an armchair behind the newspaper. "It would be a good deal cheaper than breaking the kitchen china, Maria."
"Tell her!" snorted Mrs. Carew. "She don't give me a chance. Cool as a cucumber she turns to me this morning, she says: 'Oh, I've two gentlemen to tea this afternoon, Mrs. Carew, just show them up when they come.' Then she 'ops it out of the front door like a rabbit. 'Gentlemen,' indeed, and she with not so much as a screen round her bed."
"Perhaps they are her brothers," ventured Mr. Carew.
Mrs. Carew came to a pause beside him and swept aside his paper. "Brothers!" she repeated, "now, Arthur, you know better than to say that. What I say and what I always shall say is: Let 'em do what they like outside, poor motherless girls that they are, but in my house things have got to be run straight. I won't have them bringing men in here."
"Well, hang it all, Maria, what do you want me to do? Go upstairs and turn the gents out?"