"Who is Mrs Bray?"
"She won't let you overlook who she is, and what she owns, and what she 'done,' you'll soon hear it. She's the most inquisitive blow-hard I ever came across."
Dawn now appeared and invited me to afternoon tea, which was a friendly and hospitable meal spread on a big table on a back verandah, so enclosed by creepers and pot-plants and little awnings leading in various directions as to be in reality more of a vestibule. Mrs Bray hove into near view and took up a seat beside a bank of lovely maiden-hair fern.
"How are you living?" she asked Grandma Clay as she complacently shook hands. "Nice cool weather now and not so many beastly mosquitoes."
"By Jove! Did you know about the 'skeeters' here?" inquired Andrew of me. "They're big enough to ride bikes and weigh a pound. You wait till you hear 'em singing Sankey's hymns to-night."
"If I were you I'd hold my tongue and not draw attention to my dirtiness," said Dawn. "It's a wonder a garden doesn't sprout upon you."
I was then introduced to Mrs Bray, who acknowledged me genially, and seemed so flourishing, and was so complacent regarding the fact, that it did one good to look at her.
After addressing a few remarks to me she had to move, for the trimming of her hat caught in the cage of a parakeet, and she took another seat in the shelter of a tree-fern near Uncle Jake.
"You have some lovely pet birds," I remarked by way of making myself agreeable to Grandma Clay.
"The infernal old nuisances!" she said irascibly, "I wish they'd die. Andrew calls them his, but they'd starve only for me. I'm always saying I'll have no more pets, and still they're brought here. Some day when he has a home of his own and people plague him, he'll know what it is."