“But you are a spinster, Miss Graves,” said Miss Bunter, mildly platitudinous.
“Oh, please!—” laughed Felicia. “A spinster is—” she paused in some confusion, “An old maid,” she was going to add, but she remembered it might be a tender point with Miss Bunter. Frau Schultz, however, struck in with her harsh voice,—
“At what age does a woman begin to be a spinster, Miss Graves?”
Frau Schultz's perverted sense of tact was of the quality of genius. Old Mr. Chetwynd came to the rescue of the maiden ladies.
“In England, when their first banns of marriage are published,” he said.
Mme. Boccard turned to Mme. Popea to have the reply translated into French. Then she explained it volubly to the table.
The question at issue, the relative merits of bachelors and married men, was never beaten out; for at this juncture, the meal being over, old Mr. Chetwynd rose, turned, and hobbled out of the room, taking Felicia with him.
An hour later Katherine was picking her way through the mud up the long unsightly street in the old part of the town that leads to the Hotel de Ville. At the ill-kept gateway of a great decayed house, she stopped, and entering, descended the steps at a side doorway beneath to a room on the basement, whose lunette window was on a level with the roadway. A very old woman opened the door to her knock, and welcomed her with an—
“Ah, Madame! C'est encore vous!” and led her in with many expressions of delight.
It was a poor, squalid enough room, very dark, ill-kept, littered with cooking utensils, cookery, and strange articles of clothing. An old man lay in the great wooden bedstead, his face barely visible in the dim light which was further obscured by the dingy white curtains running on a rope, fixed over the bed.