“It wasn’t Patricia that was the bother,” he explained, running the apple up and down his arm like a mouse, “it was Mrs. Daly. You know how funny ladies are about some things.”
“I do not,” I said severely.
“Well, it was about marrying a second time. Mrs. Daly couldn’t make up her mind whether it would be fair to W. W. and Patricia. She knew they liked him all right, but not whether they liked him as much as that.”
“Tell me how Patricia found all this out, and don’t bump about so much.”
“She was watching,” he replied airily. “She is that kind. I daresay the thing wasn’t difficult to find out if all the stuff she said in her letters to W. W. was true. They were awful letters, saying her mother was in anguishes about what was the best thing to do for her progeny. One letter would say, ‘Mr. K. made a lovely impression on mother to-day and I don’t think she can resist much longer.’ Then the next would say, ‘I fear all is up, for they have been crying together in the drawing-room, and when he left he banged the door.’”
“Their mother hadn’t a notion,” Tintinnabulum assured me, making an eye-glass of the apple, “that they knew there was anything in the wind.”
“Nor would they have had any such notion,” I rapped out, “if they had been children of an earlier date.”
“I suppose we are cleverer now,” he admitted. He became introspective. “I expect the war did it. It’s rummy what a difference the war has made. Before the war no one could hold two eggs in his mouth and hop across a pole. Now everyone can do it.”
I requested him to stick to the point.
“Why didn’t Patricia the emancipated go to her mother and inform her that all was well?”