Lady Adela answered in the affirmative, and Gundred made haste to clutch her share in a conversation that she could understand, by swiftly affirming that, if not, it ought to be at once.
‘Otherwise one feels it such a responsibility to live in a house—yes?’ she added.
‘I don’t like betting and gambling,’ replied Isabel, assuming a manner of exaggerated rectitude.
‘My dear!’ protested Lady Adela, looking mildly up at her over her spectacles. If Lady Adela could dislike anyone, she disliked her daughter-in-law’s new cousin. Deep in her heart she condemned Isabel as strong-minded. Tiresome and strong-minded.
‘It’s a gamble with Fate, you know,’ explained Isabel; ‘all insurance is, of course—having a bet on with the Almighty that He won’t burn down your house or throw your train off the rails.’
‘My dear!’ protested Lady Adela again.
‘You have such strange fancies, Isabel,’ said Gundred coldly. ‘You always think of things that no one else would think of.’
Clearly, as delivered in Gundred’s neat, precise tones, this was the final expression of righteous disapproval.
‘My feet must be extraordinarily small,’ said Isabel to Kingston. ‘I seem to be always putting them into it. They go into the most incredibly tiny loopholes. I don’t believe I could walk across the lid of a pepper-pot without putting my foot into it somehow.’ She stuck out both her feet in front of her, and gazed at them dispassionately.
The action may have been an instinctive appeal for admiration. The feet, though large, were beautifully shaped, with a suggestion of strength and swiftness in their lines. But Kingston angrily compelled himself to notice that they overlapped their shoes, that one shoe had lost its buckle, and that the stocking above each descended in wrinkles that betrayed a weakness in the matter of suspenders.