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Similarly, Miss Lutwyche's understanding that Mr. Torrens would come to table this evening was a flattering unction to her distressed soul, and she never questioned her omniscient handmaid's accuracy. On the contrary, she utilised a memory of some chance words of her mother to Irene, suggesting that her brother might be "up to coming down" that evening, as a warrant for replying: "I believe so."
Gwen's youth and high spirits, and her supreme contempt for the petty animosities of the domestics, made it less easy for her to understand the feelings of her old guest, and the rather anomalous position in which she had placed her. She thought she had said all she need about it when she warned Mrs. Picture not to be put out by Mrs. Masham and Lutwyche's nonsense. Servants were always like that.
She did not tell the story of the Man in the Park and his dog. She kept it to herself. She was unresponsive to the visible devotion of a Duke's eldest son, who came up to Lutwyche's standard in all particulars.
How if some other disappointment had marred his life? some passion for a woman who had rashly accepted somebody else before meeting him? This happens we know; so did Gwen, and was sorry. How if some minx Lutwyche's expression had bewitched him and slighted him? He might nurse a false ideal of her till Doomsday. Men did sometimes, coeteris paribus.
She would rather have gone on doing so than that the recollection should come back to her of Lutwyche's odious designation that she had taken to herself, so warrantably to all appearance. A plaguy old cat! What had she ever done or said to Miss Lutwyche, or any of them, to deserve such a name? And then that girl who was with her had seemed to accept it so easily certainly without any protest.
She searched for it with the tenderest of finger-tips because she knew as all the feather-bed world knows that if one is too rough with it, it goes in, and comes out again just when one is dropping off.... There! it was caught and pulled out. She would not burn it. It would smell horribly and make her think of Lutwyche's remedy for fainting fits, burned feathers held to the nostrils.
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