“Oh, my good woman, how much you have got to learn!” she cried gaily.
Mrs. Massarene patted her gown a little irritably, but she dared not resent; though it seemed to her that, after all her William had done for this lovely young lady, it was hard to be called by her a good woman.
“I’ll never learn to break the Holy Commandments, ma’am,” she said in a tone of offence.
“Oh, you dear droll creature!” cried her visitor, more and more amused.
“But let us go over your lists,” she said sharply, realizing that she was wasting valuable time on this goose. “They will want no end of weeding. I will not meet anybody who is not in my own set. You’ll get the right people if you don’t mix them with the wrong.”
With her little gold pencil as a stiletto she set to work mercilessly on her work of expurgation and execution.
Mrs. Massarene looked on helpless but agitated; a sense of wrath was stirring in her mild bosom, but she dared not show it.
“To be called a good woman!” she thought. “Just as I’d speak to the match-seller at the corner of a street!”
The lists thus weeded with such pitiless surgery produced very brilliant gatherings at Harrenden House, and the falconer of Clodion saw nearly all that was fairest and noblest pass up the grand staircase which he guarded.
Margaret Massarene, standing till she was ready to drop at the entrance of her reception-rooms, felt her head swim under her tiara as she heard the great names announced by Winters.