"And when you have got out of your cage, Ferlie, and are no more mentioned by the long-suffering Misses Mayne, except in secret and grieving prayer, and when you have trodden on your mother's heart and taken unholy satisfaction in the fascinatingly soft squelch of it, and when you have seen the iron enter into your unbelieving father's soul on your flat refusal to mate with the most promising and dyspeptically desk-chained member of his service, and when you have laid the foundations for a new Utopia where everyone will find himself uncaged and free and—if I mistake not—naked, will there really be enough blue-birds in the trees to go round?"
"You are only pretending to laugh at me, Aunt B.; you know quite well what I want."
"Six eclairs, four dough-nuts, two cream-buns, a strawberry-ice and a dose of castor oil," Aunt Brillianna promptly informed the attendant in lace cap and apron: adding with a scrutinizing glance at her white face, "you look as if you could do with that list and some over, yourself, my dear child."
The tea-girl blushed and, reading sincerity in the friendly smile, admitted that she had had a particularly long day owing to Them being shorthanded.
"Never mind," encouraged Aunt B., "I'll stand you treat with this niece of mine, provided the moment you get off duty you settle down to it at any place where the cakes are not so well-known to you as these."
Cyprian protested at her making herself responsible for their own three teas.
"Don't be silly," she advised him, "I am quite old enough to make a nephew of you if I wish. Ferlie is my great-niece and it is quite useless to try and hide the ghastly fact. And I have quite a lot of money scattered about in odd corners of the earth. Some day Ferlie shall have some to build a Temple to her Freedom goddess or god. She will find, sooner or later, that the bars she objects to are made of gold. You ought to know that. How are rubies?"
"Ferlie has told you what I do?"
"Ferlie has told me much more of all you have left undone. Quite unintentionally she has painted a portrait of you in your true colours. I doubt if you could paint her—or any woman—in hers."
"I hope the picture did not impress you altogether unfavourably?"