Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman
keeper indeed! I wish I could describe her room to you: great bowls and vases of the most expensive flowers, boxes of sweets, cigarettes; all the magazines and illustrated papers that one really does think twice about before buying. . . Clothes, too. . . I am sure that even my niece Phyllida or Culroyd’s wife, who seem to have money to burn, would not have quite such a profusion. Lingerie, gloves, handkerchiefs, the finest silk stockings—and everything thrown about on floor and chairs like so much waste-paper. And I in rags that truly honestly I am ashamed for my maid to see. . . Her dressing-table alone supported a small fortune—bottles and boxes and looking-glasses and brushes that really made me feel a pauper. The door of her bathroom was open—in that class it is a point of honour never to shut anything or put anything away—, and I saw the most extravagant array of salts and soaps and powders and scents . . . like the tiring-room of some great eastern queen. Things I simply couldn’t afford; we discontinued bath-salts when the war broke out and one had an excuse for economizing, and we have never resumed them.
“I don’t know what your plans are, Mrs. Templedown,” I said. “If you return to the stage, everything may be different, but I know my husband’s income to a penny. The court
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