“Well, no, not exactly. But I’d like to see you enjoy your food.”
“Did she go through the form of showing you her list?”
“No, my dear, she didn’t. Your father knows who is coming. I did say to her as how I wished she’d bring her children—they are such little ducks—but she gave a little scoffing laugh and didn’t even reply.”
“How can you tolerate her! You should turn her out of the house!”
“Oh, my dear Kathleen,” said Mrs. Massarene in an awed tone. “We’ve owed everything to her. If it hadn’t been for her I believe we shouldn’t have known a soul worth speaking of to this day. That old Khris (though he’s a real prince) is somehow down on his luck and can’t get anybody anywhere. You’ve made fine friends, to be sure, but they didn’t cotton to us; and your Lady Mary—whom you’ve just come from—they say, isn’t what she should be.”
“Is Lady Kenilworth?”
“Lord, she must be, my dear! Why she comes on here from Sandringham! She’s at the very tiptop of the tree. She stays at Windsor and she sits next the Queen at the Braemar gathering. What more could you have? And though she does bite my nose off and treat me like dirt I can’t help being took by her; there’s something about her carries you off your feet like; I don’t know what to call it.”
“Fascination.”
“Well, yes; I suppose you’d say so. It’s a kind of power in her, and grace and beauty and cruelty all mixed up in her, as ’tis in a pretty young cat. Your father’s that wrapped up in her he sits staring like an owl when she’s in the room, and I believe if she told him to hop on one leg round the Houses of Parliament he’d do it to please her.”
“Does he not see how ridiculous she makes him?”