“You ought to have been invited, and anyhow, wouldn’t you stay on now? There are a good many people coming, but there would be room for you, never fear.”
Even when he heard she was to have guests of her own, he actually suggested that he should send round a cab and bring them all over!
It seemed to Lucy that Florence spoke rather sharply to Jem, saying significantly, that he had better not go into the dining-room again till dinner was served. She supposed Florence was tired and cumbered. Florence had sent out a hundred and fifty Christmas cards—“Private cards, of course!”—one conventional salutation alike to oldest friend and newest acquaintance, to the wise and to the simple, the merry and the sad. And Florence had received already two hundred cards, and nearly one hundred were from people whom she had overlooked, and whom she would have to “remember” at New Year. Also, the cutler had not sent home her new fruit knives with the agate handles, and she would have to use her old ones. It was enough to provoke a saint!
The two little Brand girls were whining and fuming.
“Muriel is out of sorts,” said the lady nurse, “because she has been allowed to breakfast with her mamma and has eaten too much cake, and Sybil is out of temper because her papa has given Muriel a mechanical walking doll, and she does not think her own gift of toy drawing-room furniture so good.” She would have stamped on it had not the lady nurse taken it away.
“I must soothe them up somehow to make a pretty appearance downstairs after dinner,” she said. “And a nice to-do I shall have up here when they come back again.”
Well, at any rate, the comfort was that Florence kissed Lucy almost effusively.
“It was so sweet of you to come!” she said. She might be sharp with Jem and vexed about her children, but it was evidently all right between her and Lucy. “How well-behaved your Hugh is!” she said, and clung on to her sister, pouring out the story of all the frictions working in her own kitchen.
Lucy hinted gently that she must be at home in time for her visitors; but she remembered the mission which had brought her, and shrank from seeming unsympathetic. At last it was so late that she had to say definitely that she must go at once, or she would not be back in her own house at four o’clock.
“Dear me”—Florence looked at her watch—“you really must go! It’s well you don’t have much dressing for dinner to do, or you’d be late already. It has been such a comfort to have a reasonable creature to speak to. And you’ll take a cab, my dear, or I’ll never forgive myself for having kept you. You are to take a cab, mind!”