In this condition it had been brought ashore, and was now lying in a kind of state in Alma's dressing-room. But to-morrow it was to be buried in the grounds, probably in the glen, to which the company, all dressed in black, were to follow in procession as at a human funeral.
I was choking with anger and horror at the recital of these incredible arrangements, and at the close of it I said in a clear, emphatic voice:
"I must ask you to be good enough not to do that, please."
"Why not, my dear?" said Alma.
"Because I do not wish and cannot permit it," I answered.
There was an awkward pause after this unexpected pronouncement, and when the conversation was resumed my quick ears (which have not always added to my happiness) caught the half-smothered words:
"Getting a bit sidey, isn't she?"
Nevertheless, when I rose to leave the dining-room, Alma wound her arm round my waist, called me her "dear little nun," and carried me off to the hall.
There we sat about the big open fire, and after a while the talk became as free, as it often is among fashionable ladies of a certain class.
Mr. Eastcliff's Camilla told a slightly indelicate anecdote of a "dresser" she had had at the theatre, and then another young woman (the same who "adored the men who went to the deuce for a woman") repeated the terms of an advertisement she had seen in a Church newspaper: "A parlour-maid wants a situation in a family where a footman is kept."