Lady Dashwood now rested her head on the back of her chair and allowed Mrs. Potten to talk on.
"I'm afraid there's nothing of the Good Samaritan in me," said Mrs. Potten, in a self-satisfied tone. "I can't undertake the responsibility of a girl who is billeted out by her mother—instead of being given a decent home. I think you're simply angelic to have had her for so long, Lena."
Lady Dashwood's silence only excited Mrs. Potten's curiosity. "Most girls now seem to be doing something or other," she said. "Why, one even sees young women students wheeling convalescent soldiers about Oxford. I don't believe there is a woman or girl in Oxford who isn't doing something for the war."
"Yes, but it is the busy women who almost always have time for more work," said Lady Dashwood.
"Now, I suppose Gwendolen is doing nothing and eating her head off, as the phrase goes," said Mrs. Potten.
Lady Dashwood was not to be drawn. "Talking of doing something," she said, to draw Mrs. Potten off the subject, and there was a touch of weariness in her voice: "I think a Frenchwoman can beat an Englishwoman any day at 'doing.' I am speaking now of the working classes. I have a French maid now who does twice the work that any English maid would do. I picked her up at the beginning of the war. Her husband was killed and she was stranded with two children. I've put the two children into a Catholic school in Kent and I have them in the holidays. Well, Louise makes practically all my things, makes her own clothes and the children's, and besides that we have made shirts and pyjamas till I could cut them out blindfolded. She's an object lesson to all maids."
Lady Dashwood was successful, Mrs. Potten's attention was diverted, only unfortunately the word "maid" stimulated her to draw up an exhaustive inventory of all the servants she had ever had at Potten End, and she was doing this in her best Bradshaw style when Lady Dashwood exclaimed that she had a wire to send off and must go and do it.
"I ought to be going too," said Mrs. Potten, her brain reeling for a moment at this sudden interruption to her train of thought. She rose with some indecision, leaving her bag on the floor. Then she stooped and picked up her bag and left her umbrella; and then at last securing both bag and umbrella, the two ladies made their way down the stairs and went back into St. Aldates.
All the time that Mrs. Potten had been running through a list of the marriages, births, etc., of all her former servants, Lady Dashwood was contriving a telegram to Lady Belinda Scott. It was difficult to compose, partly because it had to be both elusive and yet firm, and partly because Mrs. Potten's voice kept on interrupting any flow of consecutive thought.
When the two ladies had reached the post-office the wire was completed in Lady Dashwood's brain.