'We must give dinner-parties, and giving dinner-parties must have what looks like a silver soup-tureen on the table.'
'What an explosion of gentility!' exclaimed Sylvana.
'My dear, hitherto we have not been in a position to buy a tureen. Now it is somewhat different.'
'Oh! because we have a paying pupil whom you can trot out. How long is she to be with us? Perhaps a month, perhaps may not come back to us at all, and then away flies this butler with the soup-tureen under his arm, and the last state of the Tomkin-Joneses is worse than the first.'
'My dear, don't be profane.'
'I am stating a fact. But how do you know that the girl Winefred is a fit person for you to patronise?' asked Miss Jones, with a malicious intonation in her voice.
'She is related to the Finnborough family.'
'Have the Finnboroughs acknowledged her?'
'They are not in Bath at present. When they learn how greatly admired she is and how much she is talked about——'