"You will remember not to say anything, won't you, Sally dear? Do promise."
"Say anything? Oh no; I shan't say anything. I never do say things. What about?"
"You know as well as I do, dear—about Julius Bradshaw."
"Of course I shan't, Tishy. Except mother; she doesn't count. I say, Tishy!"
"Well, dear. Do look alive. I'm all ready."
"All right. Don't be in a hurry. I want to know whether you really think my father drank."
"Why should I, dear? I never heard anything about him—at least, I never heard anything myself. Mamma heard something. Only I wasn't to repeat it. Besides, it was nothing whatever to do with drink." The moment Lætitia said this, she knew that she had lost her hold on her only resource against cross-examination. When the difficulty of concealing anything is thrown into the same scale with the pleasure of telling it, the featherweights of duty and previous resolutions kick the beam. Then you are sorry when it's too late. Lætitia was, and could see
her way to nothing but obeying the direction on her music, which was attacca. To her satisfaction, Sally came in promptly in the right place, and a first movement in B sharp went steadily through without a back-lash. There seemed a chance that Sally hadn't caught the last remark, but, alas! it vanished.
"What was it, then, if it wasn't drink?" said she, exactly as if there had been no music at all. Lætitia once said of Sally that she was a horribly direct little Turk. She was very often—in this instance certainly.
"I suppose it was the usual thing." Twenty-four, of course, knew more than nineteen, and could speak to the point of what was and wasn't usual in matters of this kind. But if Lætitia hoped that vagueness would shake hands with delicacy and that details could be lubricated away, she was reckoning without her Turk.