“Toast-warmers?” said Lady Claneustrigge helplessly, looking about her. “Have we any toast-warmers, Mrs. Trotter?”
Mrs. Ritz-Trotter hurried up, all smiles, and took possession of Mrs. Cambridge’s lost prey.
“No, I am afraid not,” she said; “I don’t think that the natives, you see, use so much toast as we do. They live on a peculiar sort of bread which they carry next the skin, in these bags—aren’t they quaint? Two-and-six. Not at all dear, are they?”
The prey waved her aside without ceremony, and ran her experienced, mauve eyes up and down Lady Claneustrigge in silence—the sort of silence there is at whist.
“Have you any handkerchief-shams?” she asked at last.
Lady Claneustrigge backed nervously down the stall, and then lost her head altogether. “This is it, isn’t it?” she stammered, shaking out a yellow table-centre embroidered in shells. “They work beautifully, don’t they?” she added, with a smile of obvious fear and mistrust. “It is quite worth helping them, isn’t it, to make such lovely things? It is such a splendid industry.”
“I said handkerchief-shams,” said the prey in her flat, patient tone, “that’s a table-centre; my table wouldn’t hold that.”
“It wouldn’t do for a wedding present for Lizzie, would it, auntie?” whispered a kindly girl who came with her.
“Wouldn’t stand wear,” said the prey tersely.