“Oh, I wouldn’t dare—”
Mother stopped short. Quiet as they were, they could distinctly hear the voices from the other room.
The Carter girl—she who was known as “Pig Carter” at Miss Severance’s school—was snapping, “What in the world ever made you come to this frightful hole, mama?”
“Simply because I wanted to stop some place, and I really can’t stand that mincing Miss Mitchin and her half-baked yearners and that odious creature with the beard and the ballet skirt, again.”
“At least Mitchin’s shop is better than this awful place. Why, this might be one of those railroad lunch-rooms you see from a train.”
“I’m not so sure this really is worse than the Mitchin creature’s zoo, Marky. At least this is a perfect study in what not to do. I fancy it would be a good thing for every interior decorator to come here and learn what to avoid. And, you know, they really might have done something with this place—rather a decent old house, with a good plain fireplace. But then, any one could make a charming room, and only a genius could have imagined this combination—an oak dining-room chair with a wicker table and a cotton table-cloth. I’m sure that Exhibition of Bad Taste—wasn’t it? I don’t pore over the newspapers as you do—that they held in New York would have been charmed to secure that picture of the kittens and the infant.”
All this, conveyed in the Carters’ clear, high-bred voices, Father and Mother heard perfectly.... The picture of kittens and a baby they had bought just after Lulu’s birth, and it had always hung above the couch in their living-room in New York.
Margaret Carter was continuing: “I don’t mind the bad taste a bit, but I was hungry after motoring all day, almost, and I did want a decent tea. If you could see that horrid Victorian drawing-room at Miss Severance’s you could stand even sticky kitties—in a picture. I don’t care about the interior decoration as long as Marky’s little interior gets decorated decently. But this tea is simply terrible. Orange pekoe! Why, even Miss Severance’s horrid Ceylon is better than this, and she does give you cream, instead of this milk of magnesia or soapy water or whatever the beastly stuff is. And to have to drink it out of these horrid thick cups—like toothbrush mugs. I’m sure I’ll find a chewed-up old toothbrush when I get to the bottom.”
“Don’t be vulgar, Marky. You might remember this is Massachusetts, not New York.”
“Well, this Massachusetts lettuce—I’m perfectly convinced that they used it for floor-rags before they went and lost it in the sandwiches—and this thick crumby bread—oh, it’s unspeakable. I do wish you wouldn’t poke around in these horrid places, mama, or else leave me in the car when you are moved to go slumming. I’m sure I don’t feel any call to uplift the poor.”