“Onfortunately,” said Mrs. Rastin humbly, “I was country-bred meself. I wasted all the best years of my life in service down in Essex.”
“Why, in my day,” remarked the Duchess, smoothing the torn lace at her sleeves, “in my day I’ve sat at the same table with people that you couldn’t tell from gentlefolk, thinking no more of champagne than we do of water.”
“Goodness.”
“Nobody never thought of walking,” declared the Duchess ecstatically. “It was cabs here, cabs there, cabs everywhere.”
“That’s the way,” said the interested Mrs. Rastin.
“Talk about sparkling conversation,” said the Duchess with enthusiasm. “They can’t talk like it now, that’s a very sure thing.”
“I don’t know what’s come over London,” remarked Mrs. Rastin despairingly. “It’s more like a bloomin’ church than anything else. I s’pose you was a fine-looking young woman in those days, ma’am.”
“I don’t suppose,” said the Duchess, “there was ever a finer.”
The night of that day became so extended by reason of a generous supply of drink, that Bobbie went to bed in the corner of the room and left the two women still reviewing the days and nights that were. He understood their conversation imperfectly (although God knows there was little in the way of worldly knowledge hidden from him), but he decided that the Duchess was worthy of some respect as one who had moved in society, and when she stumbled over to him and kissed him, crooning a comic song as lullaby, he felt gratified. He remembered that his mother had kissed him once. It was when he was quite a child; at about the time that his father died. For the first time he found himself thinking of her, and his mouth twitched, but he bent his mind determinedly to the ride that he was to enjoy in the morning, and having persuaded himself that everything had happened for the best, went presently to sleep, content.
The journey the next morning proved indeed to be all that imagination had suggested, with a high wind added, with the manners of a hurricane. There was a new peaked cap for him to wear; the white collar was fixed with difficulty, being by accident some two sizes too large and bulging accordingly. Mrs. Rastin, swollen eyed partly with tears, assisted him to dress; herself costumed in black garments borrowed from opulent neighbours in the Walk.