“Marie Louise, my dear!”
Marie Louise turned and came up like a wax image on casters pulled forward by an invisible window-dresser. Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s limber attitude grew erect, deadly, ominously hostile. She looked as if she would turn Marie Louise to stone with a Medusa glare, but she evidently felt that she had no right to commit petrifaction in Mrs. Prothero’s home; so she bowed and murmured:
“Ah, yis! How are you?”
To Davidge’s amazement, Miss Webling, instead of meeting 125 the rebuff in kind, wavered before it and bowed almost gratefully. Then, to Davidge’s confusion, Lady Clifton-Wyatt marched on him with a gush of cordiality as if she had been looking for him around the Seven Seas. She remembered him, called him by name and told him that she had seen his pickchah in one of the papahs, as one of the creatahs of the new fleet.
Mrs. Prothero was stunned for a moment by the scene, but she had passed through so many women’s wars that she had learned to ignore them even when––especially when––her drawing-room was the battleground.
Her mind was drawn from the incident by the materialization of the butler.
Lady Clifton-Wyatt, noting that the tide was setting toward the dining-room and that absent-minded Sir Hector was floating along the current at the elbow of the pretty young girl, said to Davidge:
“Are you taking me out or––”
It was a horrible moment, for all its unimportance, but he mumbled:
“I––I am sorry, but––er––Miss Webling––”