“And one with his hateful great feet on the embroidered cushion my cousin Ethel sent from India, and another——”
“Lucinda, you surprise me. I thought you’d be so pleased. I arranged it as a delicate attention—a pleasant surprise party. Sons of toil, dear, all of them, and——”
“Dirty brutes! I hate the whole thing. I’m tired to death.” We heard her stamp her feet viciously on the oil-cloth. “The election is all going to pieces. Let it! I don’t care. Just look at my new skirt—all mud and torn to ribbons. You never saw such a filthy place, such a set of roughs! I couldn’t even get a decent cup of tea. And—and—I went into the wrong committee room, and the man—the other man—laughed, the idiot! I wish I’d—— Oh, Tom! I never thought you could be so cruel, so unmanly. Do be yourself again. I can’t think what has come over you. It has worried me dreadfully. Let us be comfortable again. Send those monsters away.”
Gully said impressively:
“Will you go to the Wigans’ ball? I’ve got my way to make in the world. Wigan’s wife is—well, you know her. Decent old charwoman; got sense enough to hold her tongue. Wigan is sensitive on that point. If we snub his wife it may be bad for me.”
“Will I go? What a question! Of course I will.”
“And committee rooms and mass-meetings and particularly that Socialist cad——”
“Don’t mention him. I’m sick, I tell you—sick, sick. He hardly spoke a civil word to me—after the way I’ve slaved. Go and send those men away, if you love me.”
“You don’t think a little friendly supper——”
“I won’t hear of it.”