“And doesn’t she?”
The other looked incredulously at the putter of this question. Is it possible that ignorance of the simplest facts of nature and civilization could be so crass?
“She had not a farthing; and Reggy Beaulieu ran through the little he ever had before he married.”
Miss Meg’s eyes were opening rounder and rounder in riveted interest at each fresh stroke added to the portrait of the lady of the Schipperkes.
“How does she manage it?”
Bonnybell laughed again. “It is not very difficult. Of course, everybody knows that Waddy, the indiarubber-tyre man, runs her.”
“Runs her?”
“Yes; dresses her, finds her in diamonds, pays for her motor and her house in Grosvenor Street.”
It was a pity—at least, one of the interlocutors thought so—that so surprising, puzzling, and exciting a dialogue should be brought to a premature close; but ere Bonnybell could finish one more illuminating sentence, “Oh, I dare say there is no real harm in it; it is merely a matter of mutual convenience. Waddy pays and Cressida introduces him to——” the place at her other side was occupied by the elder Miss Aylmer, and Miss Ransome’s promising pupil disappeared on a message, to return no more.