“I have seen the new lodger!” he said. “At least I think it was she!”
“You have? A woman?”
“Yes, a tall, handsome personage, dressed all in forbidding and ponderous black. She was sitting in the arbour out there, talking to Jane Anne in a very friendly way.”
“It was the girl’s own mother, probably. Every girl of her class has got a bombazine mother that she produces on occasion.”
“Jane Anne is an orphan. Besides this was more than bombazine—it was—it was something very handsome, if I know anything about it—which I don’t!”
“No, there’s no black in nature!” said Mrs. Elles, smiling fondly at him. “And I should not expect you to know much about women’s dress. My—er—father knows there are such things as ruches and pipings, and that is all.”
“I do happen to know that there is such a thing as jet, and that it is very expensive. A sort of glittering coat of mail, you know, that women wear.”
“Egidia does!” cried Mrs. Elles, with a sudden little pang of jealousy. “She wore one in Newcastle, I remember, when I went to see her. Sequins!”
“Yes, the ‘bombazine mother’ wore little shining things like hers,” he replied, with a disconcerting apprehension of the intricacies of feminine apparel in Miss Giles’s case which disclosed to the woman at his side the parlous state of her own heart, if indeed she had been under any doubt about it.
He went on, “As for this wretched woman, I do hope we shall not come across her! Her voice was enough for me. I wonder how a woman with a strident unsympathetic voice like that can find anyone to live with her. I could not be in her company an hour.”