“I do not think that that consideration need sway us!” retorted she. “If we let ourselves go, a blind philanthropy might lead us to try and unpeople the Haymarket; and, moreover, it would not come to that. I have never known Felicity fail in getting hold of fingers to pull her chestnuts out of the fire for her, and she will not now.”
He agreed with this view of his sister, and said so; and then there was a pause for refreshment, the slopbowl claim having become too vocal to be longer ignored.
“She is probably as full of hereditary vice as she can hold,” resumed Camilla, presently stooping to test with her forefinger the temperature of Jock’s tea. “No, my dear boy, you are not telling the truth, it is not too hot. Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides.”
“I never heard that Ransome was particularly immoral.”
“The presumption is in favour of it; they mostly go together.”
“And we will not give him the benefit of the doubt, eh?”
“Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides, selfishness on both sides, extravagance and folly on both sides,” enumerated she, checking off the unknown’s heritage upon her fingers.
“Poor little devil!” in a tone of even profounder compassion than had conveyed his former utterance of the phrase. “If your view is correct, she starts in life pretty well handicapped, doesn’t she?”
“Poor little devil!” repeated his wife, in a key of some exasperation. “I think that we should be the poor little devils if we consented to receive such an inmate.”
“But there is no necessity for us to do so. It is easy to say no.”