“Well, I don’t suppose you can imagine me as an angel, if it comes to that,” said Laura.
Amanda was silent. She couldn’t.
“Personally I think an otter life would be rather enjoyable,” continued Laura; “salmon to eat all the year round, and the satisfaction of being able to fetch the trout in their own homes without having to wait for hours till they condescend to rise to the fly you’ve been dangling before them; and an elegant svelte figure—”
“Think of the otter hounds,” interposed Amanda; “how dreadful to be hunted and harried and finally worried to death!”
“Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse than this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I should go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably something rather primitive—a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I should think.”
“I wish you would be serious,” sighed Amanda; “you really ought to be if you’re only going to live till Tuesday.”
As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.
“So dreadfully upsetting,” Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, Sir Lulworth Quayne. “I’ve asked quite a lot of people down for golf and fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best.”
“Laura always was inconsiderate,” said Sir Lulworth; “she was born during Goodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies.”
“She had the maddest kind of ideas,” said Amanda; “do you know if there was any insanity in her family?”