“My dear”—the dowdy Jayne cousin looked alarmed—“do you think that it is in quite good taste?”
She stopped with a jerk as Mrs. McAlpine said sweetly:
“Palmistry is all the rage just now in the best houses. Prejudice of any sort is so very middle-class. We had a professional palmist at Lady Clara’s last week, when I ran up to Grosvenor Gardens for her reception. She implored me to come; we are such very old friends.”
“Mother always thought it was best to ignore such things as fortune-telling, table-turning, scientific lectures, and anything unsettling,” Annie Jayne said simply. “I don’t think I’ll have mine told, Isabel.”
Half a dozen hands were held out. The girl in white went round phlegmatically.
She distributed journeys, legacies, surprises, and mishaps with equal calm. When it came to Mrs. Clutton’s turn she held out her pretty hand, a little coarsened by devotion to her neurotic fowls and her garden, with pretended nervousness. Isabel looked at it thoughtfully and murmured something about the lines not being very clear—a certain one, at least, confusing.
“Don’t say anything dreadful. Don’t tell me I’m going to be hanged; I’ve always had a foreboding that I shall be; and Tim—my husband, you know—used to say in his most savagely dyspeptic moments that I certainly deserved the fate.”
Isabel dropped the roughened hand suddenly.
“I can’t make out your fortune,” she said coldly. “There is no one else, is there? Yours is settled, Pamela. I’ll go and have a game of tennis, if Egbert will join—croquet’s duffing.”
She moved away in her statuesque fashion, her white skirt bellowing out in the May breeze. There was a sudden coldness and constraint. Even diplomatic Mrs. Turle looked vexed.