“But, my child, how absurd. I’m the most unexacting of critters but I make it a principle, never to share a man! There must be an odd bachelor in the neighbourhood who’d be glad of a lift! A presentable, flirtable creature to make up the four!”
The youthful parlour-maid jerked at the sound of that second adjective, and scurried from the room, soup plates in hand, leaving Katrine to whisper hasty reprisals.
“Grizel, please! Wait until afterwards. It’s a young girl I am training. She belongs to the Y.W.C.A.”
Grizel’s stare changed to a smile.
“I don’t object, dear. I really don’t. So long as she’s pleased, I assure you I won’t let it make any difference!”
“But that’s just what I want it to do! Do please be sensible until dinner is over, and for mercy’s sake don’t talk about flirts. She’ll be so shocked.”
“Then she’ll be the first Y.W. I’ve ever met who was. And I don’t believe she will, neither. There’s a tilt to her cap—”
The door opened to admit the Y.W., bearing in her hands the fish, and on her face that expression of concentrated vacuity which denotes acute curiosity. Every householder has suffered such moments, and knows by experience the painful pause which ensues before one of the diners bursts vivaciously into impersonalities, but to-day there was no pause. Grizel was too nimble-witted to permit such discomfiture. There was not the slightest break in the continuity of her speech, her words flowed on in a smooth unbroken stream.
”—The which I take to typify a certain temperamental tendency towards the ornate, coupled with a desire to please, and be appreciated by those whom Providence has appointed lords among us, against which tendency all the restrictions of that admirable society—”
“Grizel! Idiot! Eat your fish. You talk too much!”