The Authoress tittered.
“Delitsiosa is the wife of Marsden Didcote,” she said, “the manager of a pawn-shop in the district of Maida Vale, and in the novel he seduces an innocent seamstress, Iris Drummond, who comes in one day to redeem her petticoat (and really I don’t know how I did succeed in drawing the portrait of a little fool!) ... and when Delitsiosa, her suspicions aroused, can no longer doubt or ignore her husband’s intimacy with Iris, already engaged to a lusty young farmer in Kent—(some boy)—she decides to yield herself to the entreaties of her brother-in-law Percy, a junior partner in the firm, which brings about the great tussle between the two brothers on the edge of the Kentish cliffs. Iris and Delitsiosa—Iris is anticipating a babelet soon—are watching them from a cornfield, where they’re boiling a kettle for afternoon tea; and oh, I’ve such a darling description of a cornfield. I make you feel England!”
“No really, my dear,” Lady Something exclaimed.
“Harold pretends it would be wonderful, arranged as an Opera ... with duos and things and a Liebestod for Delitzi towards the close.”
“No, no,” Mr Limpness protested: “What would become of our modern fiction at all if Victoria Gellybore Frinton gave herself up to the stage?”
“That’s quite true, strange thing among the cedar-boughs,” Mrs Chilleywater returned fingering the floating strings of the bandelette at her brow: “It’s lamentable; yet who is there doing anything at present for English Letters...? Who among us to-day,” she went on peering up at him, “is carrying on the tradition of Fielding? Who really cares? I know I do what I can ... and there’s Madam Adrian Bloater, of course. But I can think of no one else;—we two.”
Mr Limpness rocked, critically.
“I can’t bear Bloater’s books,” he demurred.
“To be frank, neither can I. I’m very fond of Lilian Bloater, I adore her welt-bürgerliche nature, but I feel like you about her books; I cannot read them. If only she would forget Adrian; but she will thrust him headlong into all her work. Have I ever drawn Harold? No. (Although many of the public seem to think so!) And please heaven, however great my provocation at times may be, I never shall!”
“And there I think you’re right,” the Ambassadress answered, frowning a little as the refrain that her daughter was singing caught her ear.