Mrs. Long-Adder looked at her in a sort of innocent childlike wonder.
“You have written a poem?” she said, with just the faintest unkind emphasis on the pronoun “you.”
Mrs. Arteroyd flushed and bit her lip. Then she laughed sweetly.
“Yes! It’s so easy, you know, to write about Tommy! Everybody can do it!”
Mrs. Long-Adder laughed too. Not because she was particularly moved to laughter, but because she wanted to show how much more artistic and melodious her laugh was in comparison to Mrs. Arteroyd’s.
“That is quite true!” she said, half-closing her “Mongolian” eyes in an apparent voluptuous dream. “And ‘Tommy’s Gal’ is a good title. I like it!”
She gently rolled herself to and fro on her sofa-chair or chair-sofa. She was one of those women who glory in going without corsets, and she had a marvellous way of writhing and twisting her figure under a tea-gown, suggestive of the first stirrings of a snake in long grass. She had paralyzed and stricken His Highness of Dummer-Esel into a fatuous condition of senile rapture by that special twist of herself, and had caused his little swine-like eyes to almost tumble out on his fat cheeks with the intensity of his admiring leer. She did that twist just now, and Mrs. Arteroyd instantly wondered whether she could imitate it.
“Have you the poem with you?” she asked in rich drowsy accents, broken by a half sigh.
“Only two verses,” answered Mrs. Arteroyd. “I thought it better to see if you liked them before doing any more. But I can easily turn out half a dozen—”
“Oh no! Please, no! Four will be quite sufficient,” said Mrs. Long-Adder—“The public,—especially the cultured public—will never stand more than four verses of anything. Let me hear the first two!”