“Another ill-bred amateur! What will they make of it?” snorted Aunt Gerty.
“Irene Lauderdale is Lady Scilly’s best friend.”
“Best enemy, you mean. However, it is the same thing. These unnatural friendships between Society women and actresses sicken me! Always in each other’s pockets! It is a bad advertisement for them both, and there she was, plastering George up with compliments about his books, that I don’t believe she has ever read a single one of. Sunshine indeed! He may well put sunshine into his novels; he has taken pretty good care to take it all out of one poor woman’s life!”
“I am perfectly happy, Gertrude. I look happy, I am sure.”
“You sham it.”
“That is the next best thing to being it.”
“A wretched skim-milk substitute! You are a right good sort, Lucy, and have got a husband that doesn’t come within a hundred miles of appreciating you.”
“Yes, he does, and at my true value, I suspect. I am good for what I do; I know my place and I fill it. I should only hamper George if I insisted on sharing his life and knowing his friends. I am too low for some of them, I admit; but I am too high for Irene Lauderdale. I wouldn’t condescend to have anything to do with her. I despise and scorn her!” said Mother quite loudly for her, and suddenly too, as she began so mild.
I thought what a good actress she would have made. I believe Aunt Gerty thought so too, for she screamed out, “Bravo, Luce!” Mother burst into tears. I don’t think it is nice for a daughter to see a mother’s tears, so I left the room and went into the back room where Ben was messing at something as boys will. I told him on no account whatever to go into the front room to Mother till half-an-hour had elapsed. I thought that was enough law to give her. Ben naturally asked why, and hit me over the head, not hard—Ben is a gentleman and always tempers the blow to the shy sister, but still I preferred taking a whack to giving Mother away.
A few days after that Mother went up to Fylingdales Crescent to see George on business, and found him in bed with a bad cold. You see these Society people, who are only getting their amusement cheap out of George, don’t understand the constitution of their toy, and he doesn’t like to let them see that he is only a mortal author, and that it is death to him to be without his hat for a minute or his coat for half-an-hour. He has got a very sensitive mucous membrane and catches cold in no time. I sometimes think it is the opposite of Faith-healing with him—George believes himself into his colds. He says that the sensitive mucous is the invariable concomitant of the artistic temperament, which he has. Mr. Aix says he hasn’t that, what he has is the bilio-lymphatic one, and that makes George very angry. However this may be, the tiniest bit of swagger costs him a cold in the head, and that is what he has now. He had already altered his will and begun to talk of flying to the South to be extinguished there gently, when Mother came to him.