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Hope put up her glasses to regard her daughter. "Dear me, Augusta, am I hearing right? Who is more severe than you on the mad women who dance, and sup, and frivol their money away? But there's something in what you say. The bairn needs a playtime.... To think that Jeannie Laidlaw's son should change the whole of Jean's life. Preposterous!" Mrs. Duff-Whalley was having tea with Mrs.
"You know: "'Miss Smarty gave a party, No one came. Her brother gave another, Just the same." Then, feeling suddenly that he had not improved matters, he fell silent. "Oh," said Mrs. Duff-Whalley, rearing her head like an affronted hen, "the difficulty, I assure you, is not to find guests but to decide which to select." "Quite so, quite so, naturally," murmured Mr.
Her mother was never heard to use a Scots expression and thought even a Scots song slightly vulgar. "I know I know," said Mrs. Duff-Whalley hastily. "It just came over me for a minute how your father said it. He was a very amusing man, your father, very bright to live with, though he was too fond of low Scots expressions for my taste; and he would eat cheese to his tea. It kept us down, you know.
Photographs stood about of women looking sweetly into vacancy over the heads of pretty children, and books of verses, bound daintily in white and gold, lay on carved tables. Mrs. Duff-Whalley did not care for Mrs. Jowett's tea-parties, and she always felt irritated by her drawing-room.
I'm glad I told you to put on that dress, and that new way of doing your hair is very becoming." One lovable thing about Mrs. Duff-Whalley was the way she sincerely and openly admired everything that was hers. "Now, see and do your best to make the evening go. Mr. Elliot takes a lot of amusing, and the Jowetts aren't very lively either." "Is that all that's coming?" Muriel asked.
Everywhere stood vases of heavy-scented hothouse flowers. Mrs. Duff-Whalley approved of hothouse flowers; she said they gave a tone to a room. The whole room glittered, and its mistress glittered with it as she moved about in a dress largely composed of sequins, a diamond necklace, and a startling ornament in her hair.
Elliot arrived. Mrs. Duff-Whalley greeted him impressively, and dinner was announced. Lewis Elliot was a man of forty-five, tall and thin and inclined to stoop. He had shortsighted blue eyes and a shy, kind smile. He was not a sociable man, and resented being dragged from his books to attend a dinner-party. Like most people he was quite incapable of saying No to Mrs.
I saw her the other day and she was all right." "She's quite well, but haven't you heard? She has inherited a large fortune." Mrs. Duff-Whalley said nothing for a minute. She could not trust herself to speak. Despised Jean, whom she had not troubled to ask to her parties, whom she had always felt she could treat anyhow, so poor was she and of no account.
The dinner-party I write of was not one of her more ambitious efforts. That is to say, the people who were to grace the feast were culled from the big villas on the Hill, and were not "county." Mrs. Duff-Whalley was an excellent manager, and left nothing to chance. She saw to all the details herself.
There are about half a dozen men one can ask to dinner, and that new doctor I forget his name is really quite a gentleman. Plays bridge." Jean laughed suddenly and Mrs. Duff-Whalley looked inquiringly at her. "Oh," she said, blushing, "I remembered the definition of a gentleman in the Irish R.M. 'a man who has late dinner and takes in the London Times. ... Won't you stay to tea?"
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