"Because I saw her meet the friend you speak of, and I drew my own conclusions."
"Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourself," said Mrs. Jones, very warmly, "thoroughly ashamed of yourself. As it happens the meeting was a pure accident. Mr. Skidd has been publishing some poetry; he told me about it at first; in fact he showed the first poem to me, and asked me what I thought," said Mrs. Jones, not without a pardonable little glow of satisfaction. "I thought it beautiful. Then the editor of some magazine in London came down and arranged to have all she wrote. He called by accident and met Mrs. Drayton, and they talked business. How you can put such an ill-natured construction on so simple a thing I cannot make out."
"My dear, I really—putting two and two together—I thought——"
"I shall be afraid of speaking to any one now for fear of your seeing evil in it—Mr. Paul Lyons, for instance—I shall refuse to shake hands with him."
"My dear, I wish you would not go off at a tangent like that. It is a very different thing. You are not in her position; you are not young and beautiful, and.... What in the world is the matter now?"
His wife rushed out of the room, and disdained answering him.
In the meantime Jean was bravely facing all her difficulties. Her principal difficulty was that she had a woman to deal with in the shape of a landlady who was what Jean termed a "slithery" creature. When she found that Jean looked after things she was impertinent; but that had no effect. Jean looked over her head and ignored her altogether.
Then she took to being disobliging, and would neither answer a bell nor give any help. Her next move was to let the kitchen fire out perpetually, and when Jean wanted to heat some soup and get anything hot there was no fire.
She calculated that as Grace was very ill and could not be moved, she would get the best of it in the long run.
But Jean was not a woman who would allow herself to be put out of it without giving her opinion and trying to remedy matters. She had a great contempt for the "wishy-washy" voice and untidy ways of Mrs. Cripps, a woman who lived in a black cap, and knew nothing of any but baker's bread, and could neither make "a scone or even oat-bread, let be bannocks," Jean said to Grace when she was dwelling upon the shortcomings of the house one day.