“If you get into a bad set, I tell you frankly I shall never help you out of it. A bad set is a bog; a hopeless bog; you flounder on in it till you sink. Can’t you understand? If you are going to be taken up by this kind of people, don’t ask me to do any more for you. That’s all. I don’t want to be unkind, but it must be one thing or another. I cannot come here if I am likely to meet persons whom I won’t know. Anybody would say the same.”
She spoke with severity, as to a chidden child, as she lighted a cigarette and put it between her roseleaf lips. She was in the boudoir of Harrenden House, and Margaret Massarene listened in humble and dejected silence to the rebuke. The bone of contention was represented by two visiting cards, on which were printed respectively Lady Mary Altringham and Lady Linlithgow: the bearers of those names had just been turned away from the gate below by order of the fair consor, and the mistress of Harrenden House, being a primitive person, to whom a want of hospitality appeared a crime, was swallowing her tears under difficulty.
“But surely these ladies are high and all that, ma’am?” she pleaded piteously in her ignorance.
“They were born if you mean that,” replied Mouse with great impatience. “Lady Mary was a Fitz-Frederick and the Linlithgow was a Knotts-Buller. But they are nowhere. They have put themselves out of court. No one worth thinking of knows them. They can do you no good, and they can do you a great deal of harm.”
Mrs. Massarene puckered up in her fingers the fine cambric of her handkerchief.
“But I know Lady Mary, ma’am!”
“Drop her, then.”
“What have she done, ma’am?”
“Oh, lots of things; gone wrong stupidly, turned the county against her; her boy’s tutor, and a young artist who went down to paint the ballroom, and all that kind of silly public sort of thing; people don’t speak to her even in the hunting-field. She can’t show herself at Court. The girls were presented by their grandmother. She is completely tarée—completely!”
The portrait was somewhat heavily loaded with colors, but she knew that her hearer would not be impressed by semi-tones or monochrome, and she really could not have Lady Mary coming and going at Harrenden House.