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There are all sorts, and it's all help. Some of them have nothing." "Oh if you feed the hungry," Lady Wantridge laughed, "you're indeed in a great way of business. Is Mrs. Medwin" her transition was immediate "really rich?" "Really. He left her everything." "So that if I do say 'yes' " "It will quite set me up." "I see and how much more responsible it makes one!
What he spoke of your doing for him." Lady Wantridge recalled. "Forgiving him?" "He asked you if you couldn't. But you can't. It's too dreadful for me, as so near a relation, to have, loyally loyally to YOU to say it. But he's impossible." It was so portentously produced that her ladyship had somehow to meet it. "What's the matter with him?" "I don't know."
It was not till the fourth day that she waited upon her, finding her, as she had expected, tense. "Lady Wantridge WILL ?" "Yes, though she says she won't." "She says she won't? O-oh!" Mrs. Medwin moaned. "Sit tight all the same. I HAVE her!" "But how?" "Through Scott whom she wants." "Your bad brother!" Mrs. Medwin stared. "What does she want of him?" "To amuse them at Catchmore.
Mamie wondered if that was the way he talked to her visitor, but felt obliged to own to his acuteness. It was an exact description of Lady Wantridge, and she was conscious of tucking it away for future use in a corner of her miscellaneous little mind. She withheld however all present acknowledgment, only addressing him another question. "Did you really get on with her?"
"Well, they're a worn-out old lot anyhow; they've used up their resources. They do look out and I'll do them the justice to say they're not afraid not even of me!" he continued as his sister again showed something of the same irony. "Lady Wantridge at any rate wasn't; that's what I mean by her having made love to me. She does what she likes. Mind it, you know."
"Then what's the matter with YOU?" Lady Wantridge inquired. "It's because I WON'T know," Mamie not without dignity explained. "Then I won't either." "Precisely. Don't. It's something," Mamie pursued, with some inconsequence, "that somewhere or other, at some time or other he appears to have done. Something that has made a difference in his life." "'Something'?" Lady Wantridge echoed again.
Lady Wantridge had arrived shortly after the interloper, and wishing, as she said, to wait, had gone straight up in spite of being told he was lying down. "She distinctly understood he was there?" "Oh yes ma'am; I thought it right to mention." "And what did you call him?" "Well, ma'am, I thought it unfair to YOU to call him anything but a gentleman."
Her impulse to press him on the subject of Lady Wantridge dropped; it was as if she had felt that, whatever had taken place, something would somehow come of it.
And where DO you get your ways of saying things? It isn't anything and the things aren't anything. But it's so droll." "Don't let yourself, all the same," Mamie consistently pursued, "be carried away by it. The thing can't be done simply." Lady Wantridge wondered. "'Done simply'?" "Done at all." "But what can't be?" "Why, what you might think from his pleasantness.
She was to be paid but with what was she, to that end, to pay? She had engaged to find an answer to this question, but the answer had not, according to her promise, "come." And Lady Wantridge meanwhile massed herself, and there was no view of her that didn't show her as verily, by some process too obscure to be traced, the hard depository of the social law.
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