“It was coffee, Mrs Bedley—not tea.”
“Never mind, dear, what it was the charge for a stain is the same as you know,” Mrs Bedley remarked, turning to attend to Mrs Montgomery who, with his Lankiness, Prince Olaf, had entered the Library.
“Is it in?” Mrs Montgomery mysteriously asked.
Mrs Bedley assumed her glasses.
“Mmnops,” she replied, peering with an air of secretiveness in her private drawer where she would sometimes reserve or ‘hold back’ a volume for a subscriber who happened to be in her special good graces.
“I’ve often said,” Mrs Barleymoon from her ladder sarcastically let fall, “that Mrs Bedley has her pets!”
“You are all my pets, my dear,” Mrs Bedley softly cooed.
“Have you read Men—my Delight, Bessie?” Miss Hopkins asked, “by Cora Velasquez.”
“No!”
“It’s not perhaps a very.... It’s about two dark, and three fair, men,” she added vaguely.