“I think I have heard it—poor thing! Do you know her?”
“Intimately—a charming person—quite the lady.”
“I suppose she has lots of stories—of experience.”
“Delightful creature. She was telling me the other day of the awful effects this extravagance produces on the high-born and wealthy. Many young ladies run up bills of enormous amounts, trusting to their marriage for the means of payment. But gentlemen do not marry.”
“And their bills run on.”
“Exactly—you have hit my very thought. There is one family, she tells me, where mother and daughters are deeply in debt to her, none of them daring to confide in the others for fear that the father and husband—a very strict man—should discover their embarrassments.”
“Did she tell you who they were, Mrs Magens?”
“No; but she would if I asked her, in a moment.”
“I daresay, Mrs Magens, your own dresses amount to no small sum.”
“Oh, I am so very ’umble.”