"I will bring her to tea with you, Eleanor," replies Mrs. Mounteagle, feeling she is conferring an immense honour on Mrs. Roche. "Mind you use that duck of a service, and wear your heliotrope gown. You look so distingué in it, and dear Lady MacDonald notices clothes."
"Any more orders?" asks Eleanor, laughing.
Giddy's glance sweeps over the room.
"Yes. Remove that awful photograph, the one of the old people outside a farmhouse. It is not ornamental, and quite spoils the beauty of that corner. Lady MacDonald is so critical it might catch her eye."
"Then she will have to sit with her back to it or suffer," replies Eleanor staunchly. "It is my favourite picture, and I don't mean to take it down."
Giddy sighs, puts on a martyred expression, and kicks the footstool.
"Your taste is as terrible as ever," she declares sadly, shaking her head. "What would you have been, Eleanor, if I hadn't taken you in hand?"
"I don't know, dear," she cries, feeling she has been ungrateful. "You have done me no end of good turns! But I love that portrait, it is sentiment."
"An old nurse of yours and her husband?" asks Giddy.
Eleanor flushes rosy red.