“If you’d been entirely penniless, it would have been much better for you,” Lilla pronounced distinctly. “I suppose that house of yours is let?”
“House?” said Hannah. “Oh, you mean my teeny-weeny cottage.”
“You get the rent from that, don’t you?”
“I suppose so,” Hannah said, smiling oddly, “but really, my money has such a trick of slipping through my fingers—”
“Then you can’t go there, when you leave your situation. You’d better eat humble pie, Hannah, for what’s to become of you I don’t know.”
“Well,” said Miss Mole in a drawl, “it’s just possible that I might find myself in your nice red and white house, and no later than tomorrow, for I may be dismissed without warning. In your nice house, behind the lace curtains and the geraniums and the gravel sweep, having my breakfast in bed, though I’m afraid my calico nightgowns might shock your housemaid.”
“I wear calico ones myself,” said Mrs. Spenser-Smith, putting the seal of her approval on them.
“But I don’t suppose your housemaid does.”
“And breakfast in bed is not what you want, Hannah.”
“That’s all you know about it,” Hannah said.
“What you want,” Lilla continued, “is a place where you’ll settle down and be useful, and if you’re useful you’ll be happy. Now, can’t you make up your mind to please this Mrs. Widdows?”
“She doesn’t want to be pleased. She’s been longing for the moment when she could turn me out and find another victim, and now she’s got it. And I’m not afraid of starving while I have a kind, rich cousin like you, dear. And an old schoolfellow, too! What I want at my age, which is your own, is a little light work. In a house like yours, you can surely offer me that. You must want someone to arrange the flowers and sew the buttons on your gloves, and I shouldn’t expect to appear at dinner when there’s company. You wouldn’t have to consider my feelings, because I haven’t got any, and if the cook gave notice, I could cook, and if the parlourmaid gave notice, I should be tripping round the damask.”
“Yes, I daresay! And spilling the gravy on it! And, as it happens, my servants don’t give notice. At the first sign of discontent, they’re told to go.”
“That’s the way to treat them!” Hannah cried encouragingly. “But if they fell ill, Lilla,” she leant forward coaxingly, “think what a comfort I should be to you! And you know, Ernest had always a soft spot in his heart for me.”
“Yes,” said Lilla, “Ernest’s soft spots are often highly inconvenient. Today, for instance, when I wanted the car to take me home after a busy afternoon, he chooses to lend it to someone else. I have to be at the chapel this evening for the Literary Society Meeting and I should be worn out if I made two journeys across the Downs beforehand.”
“Good for your figure,” Hannah said. “The time may come when your tailor won’t be able to cope with it. So that’s why you’re dining out. I should like to see you at the Literary Meeting, trying not to yawn. What’s the subject?”
“Charles Lamb.”
“Hardy annual,” Hannah muttered, twitching her nose.
“It’s a duty,” Mrs. Spenser-Smith said patiently, yet with a touch of grandeur. “I’d much rather stay at home with a nice book, but these things have to be supported, for the sake of the young people.”
“Ah yes, but it isn’t the young people who go to them. It’s the old girls, like myself, who have nothing else to do. I’ve seen them, sitting on the hard benches, half asleep, like fowls gone to roost.”
“They’ll go to sleep tonight,” Lilla admitted, “though,” she added as she remembered to keep Hannah in her place, “I don’t see why you should try to be funny at their expense. Trying to be funny is one of your failings.”
Miss Mole answered meekly. “I know I ought never to see a joke unless my superiors make one, and then I’ve got to be convulsed with admiring merriment. I’ve no right to a will nor an opinion of my own, but somehow—I’m that contrary!—I insist on laughing when I’m amused and exercising my poor intelligence. Let me come with you tonight, Lilla, and I might make a speech.”
“You might make a fool of yourself,” said Mrs. Spenser-Smith, picking up her modestly rich fur necklet and settling it at her throat. “Go back to Channing Square, at once, and do, for goodness sake, try to see which side your bread is buttered. And, in any case, Mr. Blenkinsop’s lecture wouldn’t entertain you. He’s rather a dull young man. What’s the matter?” she asked, for Hannah had put down the bun she was lifting towards her mouth and the mouth remained open.
“Such a funny name!” Hannah murmured. She leaned back and folded her hands on her lap. “I like to coordinate—or whatever the word is—my impressions with other people’s facts. Now, that name. I should have suspected its owner of being a dull young man, a rather owlish young man, with a Biblical Christian name. Am I right?”
“His name is Samuel,” said Mrs. Spenser-Smith, impatient with this topic.
“And he’s a member of your chapel?”
“Not a very worthy one, I’m sorry to say. He’s highly irregular.”
Now Hannah leaned forward, her eyes sparkling. “You’re not going to tell me he’s a bit of a rake?”
The droop of Mrs. Spenser-Smith’s eyelids effaced a world which had any acquaintance with rakes. “Irregular in his attendance on Sundays,” she said coldly.
“That upsets one of my theories, but it’s interesting. Are you going, Lilla? Try to find a corner for me in your red and white house. I’ve been past it several times. I like the colour scheme. The conjunction of the yellow gravel with the geraniums—”
“The geraniums are over,”
