“Me! I could have worn evening dress with anybody, if I’d wanted to!” came the scornful answer.
“And why didn’t you want to?” he asked pertinently. “Or did you wear it?”
There was a long pause. Mrs. Radford readjusted the bacon in the Dutch oven. His heart beat fast, for fear he had offended her.
“Me!” she exclaimed at last. “No, I didn’t! And when I was in service, I knew as soon as one of the maids came out in bare shoulders what sort she was, going to her sixpenny hop!”
“Were you too good to go to a sixpenny hop?” he said.
Clara sat with bowed head. His eyes were dark and glittering. Mrs. Radford took the Dutch oven from the fire, and stood near him, putting bits of bacon on his plate.
“There’s a nice crozzly bit!” she said.
“Don’t give me the best!” he said.
“She’s got what she wants,” was the answer.
There was a sort of scornful forbearance in the woman’s tone that made Paul know she was mollified.
“But do have some!” he said to Clara.
She looked up at him with her grey eyes, humiliated and lonely.
“No thanks!” she said.
“Why won’t you?” he answered caressively.
The blood was beating up like fire in his veins. Mrs. Radford sat down again, large and impressive and aloof. He left Clara altogether to attend to the mother.
“They say Sarah Bernhardt’s fifty,” he said.
“Fifty! She’s turned sixty!” came the scornful answer.
“Well,” he said, “you’d never think it! She made me want to howl even now.”
“I should like to see myself howling at that bad old baggage!” said Mrs. Radford. “It’s time she began to think herself a grandmother, not a shrieking catamaran——”
He laughed.
“A catamaran is a boat the Malays use,” he said.
“And it’s a word as I use,” she retorted.
“My mother does sometimes, and it’s no good my telling her,” he said.
“I s’d think she boxes your ears,” said Mrs. Radford, good-humouredly.
“She’d like to, and she says she will, so I give her a little stool to stand on.”
