“Dear me, no,” she answered in surprise. “She’s very amusing when you know her. Mr. Price got her into such a state of nerves. He did me, too. Do you understand him?”
“No, but I think he is only trying to mix society; just what you want to do with Mrs. Potter. If you encourage her you ought to encourage him.”
Teresa looked at him to see whether he was laughing, but they had come to a stile and he was waiting politely for her to get over. Instead of climbing she sat down on it and faced him. “It is absolutely different,” she began to explain. “What I can’t bear is to find people, who would be just like you if they had been sent to school and fed, unable to express themselves and living in such horrible places that one can hardly attend to what they are trying to say because of the awfulness. And it is nonsense to say that they can always get out. All self-made men say afterwards that they were newsboys, but there are thousands of darling newsboys who haven’t got just the bit of extra that made Dick Whittington; and, as my mother says, purring among her furs on a platform, ‘they are often taught to be bad.’ She does talk such rot, and yet often her platitudes wouldn’t be so telling if they were not made up over a small piece of truth. There is nothing like that about that dreadful man Price; is there now? Come, speak up.”
“He wants to get into a better set and explain himself,” said David.
“Nonsense,” answered Teresa, “not a better set at all; only a more fashionable one.”
“Well, but you say that your set isn’t any better than Mrs. Potter’s, only more fashionable. If that is so then Mrs. Potter is a snob like Price. But if you claim some other advantage that you want Mrs. Potter to share, why shouldn’t Price be sensitive about having been born outside a set that claims to be better than his own?”
“I wish I could get someone who has as much ‘lip’ as you have to talk to you,” said Teresa. “I can’t do it, but I know you are wrong.”
“Your Potter vocabulary is beyond me,” said David politely.
CHAPTER VIII
The curtain now goes up on Evangeline’s marriage. It took place six months ago. Cyril has a new A.D.C. with a fluffy wife and blue-eyed child; all three as happy as grigs. His name is Jimmy Trotter—(the Trotters of Burnside) and she was Miss Fripps of Ely, a daughter of the famous Dean Fripps. Cyril doesn’t mind Trotter, who does his work all right, and Mrs. Trotter is always good fun at a party, though Susie thinks she is rather empty-headed, and can’t understand how she can afford a nurse like that for the baby; it would be much more sensible if she looked after it herself, and got a really nice girl to take charge in the afternoon. Mrs. Trotter thinks not, as she does not believe in nice girls and prefers to save money by doing the cooking in which she is expert and let the baby have the whole attention of a woman whom she can trust. She doesn’t believe in making oneself a premature fright by being a Jack-of-all-trades. They have recurrent arguments on this question and Susie gets the worst of it, for Mrs. Trotter disposes of platitudes as she would of kitchen refuse, without a moment’s thought whether there may not be diamonds among them. Therefore, Susie says she is empty-headed, and does not care to see more of her than politeness demands.