“I was afraid I should have been prevented from coming, dear Mrs. Turle. One can’t possibly attend a garden-party in a coat and skirt”; she looked complacently at her embroidered bodice, “and my lost box only turned up last night.”
The face of every lady immediately became solemnly sympathetic.
“I told you all about it, didn’t I? I’d been visiting at Warne—taking my best things, of course. The things, you know”—she gave a quick glance of her narrow eyes at Mrs. Clutton—“that one takes with one on a visit at a house where they are—well, rather particular. Dear Laura entertains so largely at Warne.”
One or two ladies on the edge of the second-best set looked at her with reverential alarm. Here was a person who visited on such positively equal terms at Warne, the biggest seat for miles round, that she called the hostess by her Christian name!
“I was in despair.” She flattened out her hands. “My box lost! My diamond comb and pendant, my jeweled girdle, a miniature set with diamonds that was given to my great-uncle by the Duke of Wellington, my ivory-backed brushes and silver toilet set—all the small, necessary trifles that one takes on a visit.”
“And you got them back?” asked a little lady breathlessly.
She was a shabby Jayne. Sophy did not often ask her to a garden-party, and she was feverishly voluble and deprecating in turn. She had a home-made blouse, with a funny tucker, and very new black kid gloves, the perfect palms of which she constantly displayed.
“I got it back,” Mrs. McAlpine said carelessly, giving the home-made blouse a look of amiable condescension. “But you may all imagine how I felt; one sets such store by one’s poor trifles.”
A massive girl, with a white gown, threw down her mallet as a member of the opposition clicked her ball against the stick.
“I can’t play any more; too slow,” she said. “I’ll tell somebody’s fortune instead.”