"Oh, Elizabeth!"
"A fact, I assure you," said Elizabeth. "We always have a suet dumpling once a week because of that. I'm afraid I'm not being very helpful, Kirsty. Do let's think of something quite new, only it's almost sure not to be good. That is so discouraging about the dishes one invents.... Apart from puddings, how is Archie?"
"Oh, he's quite well, and doing very well in business. He has Father's good business head."
"Yes," said Elizabeth. She did not admire anything about the Rev. Johnston Christie, least of all his business head. He was a large pompous man, with a booming voice and a hearty manner, and he had what is known in clerical circles as a "suburban charge." Every Sunday the well-dressed, well-fed congregation culled from villadom to which he ministered filled the handsome new church, and Mr. Christie's heart grew large within him as he looked at it. He was a poor preacher but an excellent organiser: he ran a church as he would have run a grocery establishment. His son Archie was exactly like him, but Christina had something of her mother, a deprecating little woman with feeble health and a sense of humour whom Elizabeth called Chuchundra after the musk-rat in the Jungle Book that could never summon up courage to run into the middle of the room.
"Yes," said Elizabeth, "I foresee a brilliant future for Archie, full of money and motor-cars and knighthoods."
"Oh! I don't know," said Christina, "but I think he has the knack of making money. How are your brothers?"
"Both well, I'm glad to say. Walter has got a new job—in the Secretariat—and finds it vastly entertaining. Alan seems keener about polo than anything else, but he's only a boy after all."
"You talk as if you were fifty at least."
"I'm getting on," said Elizabeth. "Twenty-eight is a fairly ripe age, don't you think?"
"No, I don't," said Christina somewhat shortly. Christina was thirty-five.