"—but no. It's always whether people wear clothes because they're modest or whether they're modest because they wear clothes, or something like that.—And Walter begins it—and then Laura chimes in, and then Cosimo, and then Amory, and then Dickie—and when they've said it all on Monday they say it again on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and every day—and I don't know what they've decided even yet——"
"Well, here we are," Dorothy said as she reached her own door. "Let's have some tea.... Mr. Miller hasn't been in yet, has he, Ruth?"
"No, m'm."
"Well, we'll have tea now, and you can make some fresh when he comes. And keep some cakes hot."
Mr. Miller's visit that afternoon had to do with a care so trifling that Dorothy merely took it in her stride. She had not found—she knew that she would never find—the "Idee" that Mr. Miller wanted; but if no Idees except real ones were ever called Idees we should be in a very bad way in this world. She knew that there is always a middling chance that if you state a pseudo-Idee solemnly enough, and trick it out with circumstance enough, and set people talking enough about it, it will prove just as serviceable as the genuine article; and she was equally familiar, as we have seen, with that beautiful and compensating Law by which quick and original minds are refused money when they are producing of their best but overwhelmed with it when their brains have become as dry as baked sponges. She had given Mr. Miller quite good Idees in the past; she had no objection to being paid over again for them now; and if they really had been new ones they would have been of no use to Mr. Miller for at least ten years to come. That is why the art of advertisement is so comparatively advanced. Any other art would have taken twenty years.
Therefore, as she remembered the exceeding flimsiness of the one poor Idee she had, she had resolved that Mr. Miller's eyes should be diverted as much as possible from the central lack, and kept to the bright irrelevancies with which she would adorn it. The Idee was that of the Litmus Layette ... but here we may as well skip a few of Katie's artless betrayals of her former friends, and come to the moment when Mr. Miller, with his Edward the Sixth shoulders, appeared, bowed, was introduced to Katie, bowed again, sat down, and was regaled with hot cakes and conversation. He had risen and bowed again, by the way, when Dorothy, for certain reasons of policy, had mentioned Katie's relationship to the great Sir Joseph Deedes, and Katie had told of a stand-up fight she had had with her uncle's Marshal about admittance to his lordship's private room.
"Well, now, that's something I've learned to-day," Mr. Miller magnanimously admitted, sitting down again. "So your English Judges have Marshals! I was under the impression that that was a military title, like Marshal Macmann and Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. Well now.... And how might Judge Deedes' Marshal be dressed, Miss Deedes?"
"Not 'Judge' Deedes," said Katie smiling. "That's a County Court Judge." And she explained. Mr. Miller opened his eyes wide.
"Is that so-o-o? Well now, if that isn't interesting! That's noos. He's a Honourable with a 'u' in it, and a Sir, and you call him his Lordship, and he's Mister Justice Deedes! Ain't that English!... Now let me see if I'm on the track of it. 'Your Worship'—that's a Magistrate. 'Your Honour'—that's the other sort of Judge. And 'My Lord'—that's Miss Deedes' uncle. And an English Judge has a Marshal.... Do you recollect our Marshals, Mrs. Stan?——"
Building (as it now appeared) even better than he knew, Mr. Miller had, in the past, granted the rank of Marshal to Messrs. Hallowell and Smiths' shopwalkers.