And throwing off her hat and jacket, she sank into a comfortable arm-chair with a sigh of fatigue. Her daughter quietly loosened her mother's walking-shoes and took them away. Then they kissed each other, and Nora went to look after the tea. She was a slim, pale-faced school-girl, with yellow-brown eyes, and yellow-brown hair, not as yet very attractive in looks, but her mother was convinced that it was only the plainness of the cygnet, and that the swan was only a few years off. Nora, who at seventeen had no illusions, was grateful to her mother for the belief but did not share it in the least.
"I'm sure you gave that girl half an hour over time," she said reprovingly, as she handed Lady Tonbridge her cup of tea—"I can't think why you do it." She referred to the solicitor's daughter whom Lady Tonbridge had been that afternoon instructing in the uses of the French participle.
"Nor can I. A kind of ridiculous esprit de métier I suppose. I undertook to teach her French, and when after all these weeks she don't seem to know a thing more than when she began, I feel as if I were picking her dear papa's pockets."
"Which is absurd," said Nora, buttering her mother's toast, "and I can't let you do it. Half a crown an hour is silly enough already, and for you to throw in half an hour extra for nothing, can't be stood."
"I wish I could get it up to four hours a day," sighed the mother, munching happily at her toast, while she held out her small stockinged feet to the fire which Nora had just lit. "Just think. Ten shillings a day—six days a week—ten months in the year. Why it would pay the rent, we could have another servant, and I could give you twenty pounds a year more for your clothes."
"Much obliged—but I prefer a live Mummy—and no clothes—to a dead one. More tea?"
"Thanks. No chance, of course. Where could one find four persons a day, in Maumsey, or near Maumsey, who want to learn French? The notion's absurd. I shouldn't get the lessons I do, if it weren't for the 'Honourable.'"
"Snobs!"
"Not at all! Not a single family out of the people I go to deserve to be called snobs. It's the natural dramatic instinct in us all. You don't expect an 'Honourable' to be giving French lessons at half a crown an hour, and when she does, you say—'Hullo! Some screw loose, somewhere!'—and you at once feel a new interest in the French tongue, and ask her to come along. I don't mind it a bit. I sit and spin yarns about Drawing-rooms and Court balls, and it all helps.—When did you get home?"
For Nora attended a High School in a neighbouring town, some five miles away, journeying there and back by train.