"Well, I don't! Now go on reading.... 'She took a good long look at herself....'" Mrs. Eldridge considered whether she should reveal the thought in her mind that Mr. Challis must also have taken a good long look to know. No!—she would not! Whatever she was, she was not a mischief-maker; and to prove this to her own satisfaction, she not infrequently abstained from saying something about a lady and gentleman. She often found an opportunity of doing this, as she never thought on any subject not spiced with both. Satisfaction to conscience through this abstention would be sure to result in free handling soon after. Also, the abstention was easy to her this time, because she believed—rightly or wrongly—that Marianne knew she was making it.
Perhaps rightly, but no outward sign to that effect came. Marianne glanced forward in the letter, and went on reading: "'This young woman, I fancy, is savagely jealous of the younger sister posing as an active promoter of all sorts of upnesses-to-date....' I wish," said the reader parenthetically, "that Titus wouldn't use such unusual expressions. I dare say they are very clever, but I don't profess to understand ... what?... Oh, of course, I see what he means, but it's a kind of thing I shall never understand.... No, my dear Charlotte!—it's no use talking and trying to persuade me. 'Upnesses-to-date'—just fancy!" Now Titus had been in two minds whether to allow this phrase to remain, but had decided to do so, as better on the whole than to provoke speculation over an obliterated text. He might have speculated himself over such an erasure.
"I don't think it implies anything," said Mrs. Eldridge, meaning of course, anything about a lady and gentleman. "I fancy he is only referring to Art Movements and Liberty silks and things. Go on." And Marianne read:
"'All sorts of upnesses-to-date, doing things her grandmothers would have thought infra dig....' What does that mean?"
"Lord, Marianne!—that doesn't mean anything. Do go on. Only what they would be too swell to do! That's all." Marianne continued:
"'Infra dig., while she herself is not allowed to try her luck and face the music. She has the courage for it, evidently. Old Norman blood! By-the-bye, I've been damning William the Conqueror up and down ever since I came. For the old cock is besotted about him. Says he was the first Socialist, and never talks of anything else!'... It's not interesting, this!" She stopped.
"No—that's not interesting. I want to hear more about the girl's looks. Couldn't you find what he says about her figure? You said he laid stress on it."
"In his other letter. Tall and striking. Dignified kind of girl."
"I should hardly call that laying stress on her figure, as such." Mrs. Challis reflects upon this rather paradoxical view of her friend's. She is not as clear as she might be often over her husband's elisions and hyperboles, and does not feel sure she reported him rightly. "Perhaps," she says, "I should not have said 'laid stress on.'" Her friend says oh no!—"laid stress on" was all right. But there was some indeterminateness in what he was said to have laid stress on. However, Mrs. Eldridge excuses further elucidation. "Sure there's nothing more about that girl?" she asks.
"Yes, there's some more somewhere. Oh—here!... 'As to the lovely Judith, of course, she might prove a duffer behind the footlights. But then, again, she mightn't. She's the very thing for Aminta Torrington in "Mistaken Delicacy."' That's the name his new play's to be called. I liked 'Atalanta in Paddington' better myself."