“Oh, all the English do in their hearts,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?”
Miss Schley was eating sole a la Colbert with her eyes on her plate. She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
“We’re pretty respectable over in America, I suppose,” she drawled. “Why not? What harm does it do anyway?”
“Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is strictly respectable life is plain sailing.”
“Oh, life is never that,” said Mrs. Trent, “for women.”
Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
“Never, never,” she said in her curious voice—a voice in which tears seemed for ever to be lingering. “We women are always near the rocks.”
“Or on them,” said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands she had divorced.
“I like a good shipwreck,” exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice. “I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show their mettle.”
“It’s always dangerous to speak figuratively if she’s anywhere about,” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. “She’ll talk about lowering boats and life-preservers now till the end of lunch.”