Edward offered her a choice of excellent foods, and Camilla suggested that perhaps for the future she would prefer to breakfast in her own room.
She was about to accept joyfully the offer, when, just in time, some inward monitor—or was it a look on Mr. Tancred’s face?—warned her that it was sarcastic, and not meant to be taken seriously.
With trembling thanksgiving at having—and only by a hair’s-breadth—shaved the first pitfall set for her, she hastened to change the trend of her response.
“Oh no, thanks, not for worlds! I think it is a horrid habit.”
Once again Edward looked at her, and something regretful in his eye made her feel that it would have been better to have been content with the refusal of Camilla’s ironical offer, and not to have added the ornamental mendacity at the end.
Having accepted coffee, and then wished that she had chosen tea, as being more English and less reminiscential of foreign ways, Miss Ransome ate her breakfast in a wary but smiling silence. Casting about in her mind for a safe and mollifying topic, her eye presently furnished her with one.
“What a beautiful portrait!” she said, pitching with inherited bad taste upon the only modern picture in the room.
“It has no business to be here,” replied Camilla, casting a brief and unadmiring glance upon the presumptuous intruder among a goodly company of Antonio Mores, Cornelius Janssens, Romneys, and Gainsboroughs, “but my parents had it hung there, and I have naturally not liked to move it.”
The idea of Camilla ever having had parents, and not having issued directly from the bosom of Primeval Night, was so stupefying to Bonnybell that it kept her dumb long enough for Edward to throw in, as he did rather hurriedly—
“It is a portrait of my wife by Graves, given her, when she came of age, by the tenants.”