“Don’t be absurd, Miriam,” returned her pupil in an even tone, with a purified articulation that would have made Minnie Hopper stare. “I may cost eight hundred dollars more than you at the moment, but I look new, and you know it. Whereas you will always look good, without looking new, no matter if you’re straight out of a bandbox. If I’ve made any progress at all, the proof of it is that I recognize the truth of what I’ve just said. . . . Not only that, but you can console yourself with the knowledge that if you sit opposite me till Doomsday you’ll never utter a syllable that couldn’t be printed in a book of etiquette. Whereas I,—well, the mere fact that they’ve pulled out my lopsided eyebrow doesn’t mean that before the sun sets I shan’t do and say some inadvertent bêtise that will proclaim the pit from which I was digged and make you say to yourself, ‘Why does she?’. . . . One comfort is that most of these expensive people here are even more plebeian, at least in their souls, than I am, and you’re almost the only person in the world whom I can’t fool. . . . Fancy not having you there to be genteel to, and to shock,—especially to shock! At any moment I may deliberately say something vulgar, dear. The temptation often comes over me in hot waves.”
“The ‘deliberately’ redeems you. Most people are vulgar without knowing it; they would bite off their tongues if they knew. . . . As for inadvertence, you’ve made only one faux pas in days.”
“Oh, dear! What?”
“Yesterday, at that awful house.”
“Mrs. Pardy’s? Why, darling, you took me there yourself, as a treat.”
“Yes, but it was Elsa Pardy we went to leave cards for. Elsa was one of the nicest girls in Washington when I knew her there. I would never have looked her up in that casual way if I had foreseen such a fulsome sister-in-law.”
Louise laughed at the recollection, snuggling into the thought that Mrs. Pardy could not be laid at her door. Then came the thought of her alleged remissness. “I hope I didn’t out-faux Mrs. P. . . . I wonder how Keble would like me to call him Mr. E.”
“No wonder Elsa doesn’t stay there.”
“But, Miriam, my faux pas! I won’t be done out of my daily correction.”
Miriam smiled indulgently. “It was the merest trifle. Indeed if Mrs. Pardy had made it, it would have done her credit. For that matter she did, effusively, and if we hadn’t been such fastidious folk we should have lauded her for it. And I do!”