George interrupted her. “Such is Fame! I have no doubt, Belle Irene, that if you were to ask for any one of Aix’s books—The Dustman, or The Laundress, or Slackbaked! you would be offered a plethora of them.”
Irene took her cue. “But,” she drawled, “it is extraordinary! Impossible! Inconceivable! Books like yours, that rejoice the thirsty soul, that refrigerate the arid body, that bring God’s great gift of sunshine down into our too gloomy grey homes! I always say this, dear, dear Mr. Vero-Taylor, that you, of all men, have caught the secret of imprisoning the jolly sunbeams. Every page of yours is instinct with light——”
It sounded like an advertisement of some new kind of soap. Aunt Gerty didn’t like it at all, and in a rage with George she put out her hand suddenly and spilt a vase of flowers in water.
“Brute!” she said, and the assistant who mopped up the water kept saying, “Not at all!” not thinking Aunt Gerty meant the gentleman who had just left the shop in haste, but as apologizing for her own stupidity in upsetting the water.
“Who was that lady?” I asked Aunt Gerty as we went home, though I knew well enough.
“Izzie Lawder, a lady! I remember her—well, perhaps I hadn’t better say what I remember her! She and I—she had got on a bit ahead of me even then—played together at the ’Lane’ in ‘Devil Darling!’ ten years ago. She has got on since. Everybody to give her a leg up! You know the sort—dyed hair and interest! She soon left nice honest me behind.”
“Hadn’t you the interest, Aunt Gerty?” I knew she had the other thing.
“Don’t be impertinent, Miss. Let us get home and tell Lucy. Won’t she be electrified!”
But Mother wasn’t a bit electrified.
“All in the way of business, my dear girl!” she said to Aunt Gerty, who chattered about Irene all the rest of that day. “Do subside about my wrongs, if you don’t mind. I dare say he wants to get her to play lead in the drama he is writing with Lady Scilly, and that is why he is so civil to her.”