I was choking with anger and horror at the recital of these incredible
arrangements, and at the close of it I said in a clear, emphatic voice:
"I must ask you to be good enough not to do that, please."
"Why not, my dear?" said Alma.
"Because I do not wish and cannot permit it," I answered.
There was an awkward pause after this unexpected pronouncement, and when
the conversation was resumed my quick ears (which have not always added
to my happiness) caught the half-smothered words:
"Getting a bit sidey, isn't she?"
Nevertheless, when I rose to leave the dining-room, Alma wound her arm
round my waist, called me her "dear little nun," and carried me off to
the hall.
There we sat about the big open fire, and after a while the talk became
as free, as it often is among fashionable ladies of a certain class.
Mr. Eastcliff's Camilla told a slightly indelicate anecdote of a
"dresser" she had had at the theatre, and then another young woman (the
same who "adored the men who went to the deuce for a woman") repeated
the terms of an advertisement she had seen in a Church newspaper: "A
parlour-maid wants a situation in a family where a footman is kept.
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