Joan laughed. It was a wild little laugh, and she felt there was no sense in it.
“I might apply for a place in Miss Alicia’s Home for Decayed Gentlewomen,” she said.
Lady Mallowe nodded her head fiercely.
“Apply, then. There will be no place for you in the home I am going to live in,” she retorted.
Joan ceased moving about. She was about to hear the one argument that was new.
“You may as well tell me,” she said wearily.
“I have had a letter from Sir Moses Monaldini. He is to be at Broome Haughton. He is going there purposely to meet me. What he writes can mean only one thing. He means to ask me to marry him. I’m your mother, and I’m nearly twenty years older than you; but you see that I’m out of the trap first.”
“I knew you would be,” answered Joan.
“He detests you,” Lady Mallowe went on. “He will not hear of your living with us—or even near us. He says you are old enough to take care of yourself. Take my advice. I am doing you a good turn in giving it. This New York newsboy is mad over you. If he hadn’t been we should have been bundled out of the house before this. He never has spoken to a lady before in his life, and he feels as if you were a goddess. Go into the billiard-room this instant, and do all a woman can. Go!” And she actually stamped her foot on the carpet. “You might live in the very house you would have lived in with Jem Temple Barholm, on the income he could have given you.”
She saw the crassness of her blunder the next moment. If she had had an advantage, she had lost it.