“I am afraid we have none of those things just now,” Mrs. Ritz-Trotter said, throwing a protecting arm across Lady Claneustrigge, who looked on the verge of tears under this inexplicable form of torture. “You see, in those hot countries the natives take such light breakfasts of fruit, and so on, that they hardly understand our home comforts. But I expect they could easily be taught to make them, couldn’t they, Lady Claneustrigge?”
A grateful nod and incoherent assurances. You must remember that the mauve eyes had never ceased their travelling, up and down, up and down, taking in every detail; sucking it in, absorbing every knot, every jewel, as though it were some harmful, irresistible drug.
“I’ll take one of those,” she said at last, pointing to a small purse of shells marked one-and-ninepence. I know, as surely as a mother knows what a baby will do with a pot of jam, that the woman took the purse home and put it on the dressing-table of her spare room, and that her frost-bitten guests put hair in it on every day of their critical, ungrateful visits.
“Very tahrsome, isn’t it, explaining to those sort of people?” was apparently the last word that Mrs. County would ever have the energy to pronounce, as she passed our stall with the preoccupation of a woman of ten thousand worlds.
I wonder how I shall paint Mrs. Merchant to-morrow. She wants me to do a thing in a white satin evening dress, sitting on a sofa, or standing up near a doorway, or just looking intelligent and ladylike on canvas, with a dark background and a light forehead. I can’t paint her as I should like at the head of a breakfast table, feeding all the little Merchants with Force out of a packet with the label on, or in a nightgown and a fur coat, with her hair down, and flames all over the back of the picture.
She has a beautiful character, and if only they had not frightened her as a little girl, no one could have been more charming. They began by telling her how easily shocked the angels were, and that there could be no moments of indulgence in moral carpet slippers and dressing-gown, because the angels never went down (or up) for meals, or even to fetch a handkerchief. They were “there all the while,” like the gentleman at the famous siege, and they were shocked if children did practically anything that their elders do. Later in life the bogy held over her head was what “people” would say. The angels apparently don’t concern themselves with any one over half-fare age. When she turned twelve they dropped off, and that vague creature “people” took on the job. You can imagine “people” buttoning on his uniform and taking over the name, age, and previous record of the young sufferer. Do you remember how you exploded the idea of “people” when we were at school? You walked down a whole street with your tongue out, and I ate peas with my knife at a restaurant, and no one said anything. You went home and told your mother that if “people” were ever going to say anything, now was the time to do it, and you didn’t believe that there were any “people” at all. Mrs. Merchant still “goes by what people say” a good deal, and I sometimes find it difficult to talk to her on this account. There is a “people” deposit left on her mind, which has to be scraped off before one can see what she is like. She and her husband came to supper at the Cambridges’ last Sunday, and after supper, when the men were downstairs smoking, we got on the subject of religion.
In that respect Mrs. Merchant does not altogether “go by what people say.” She goes by it for a time, and gets over a good many difficult bits with its assistance, but when it comes to plain ethics she does as she likes.
“I don’t think that bazaars are very nice, do you?” she asked Mrs. Cambridge. “People seem to like them very much, but I think it would be nicer if we all sent the money to the Archipelago if they really want it there, or if the natives’ work were introduced at some shop we could buy it if we wanted to. People did stare so at the stall holders, didn’t they?”
This gave me an idea. Suppose that “people,” who say all the horrible things that frighten us, are the ghoulish ladies who buy receptacles for hair! Suppose that they go about dressed like that because they are detectives (if you come to think of it they never look as if they had any legitimate business of their own to mind), and that after a visit from one of them this or that information “gets about,” “people are saying it,” etc. If I had thought for a moment when I was at the bazaar that I had run down my lifelong enemy, I should have taken a revolver and sacrificed myself for the good of humanity by shooting the lot of them dead and taking the consequences.