Читать книгу The Celebrity at Home - Violet Hunt - Страница 8

I WONDER if other families have got tame countesses, who come bothering and interfering in their affairs? I don’t mind our having a house-warming party at all, but I do hate that it should be to please Lady Scilly.

“A party! A party!” she said to George, clasping her hands in her silly way. “My party on the table!” like the woman in the play of Ibsen. “Ask all the dear, amusing literary people that I adore. And I’ll bring a large contingent of smart people, if I may, to meet them. Please, please!”

I don’t know what a contingent is, but I fancy it’s something disagreeable. Lady Scilly is George’s friend, not Mother’s. She has only called on Mother once, and that was in the old house, and then Mother was not receiving as they call it, so she has never even seen the mistress of the house where she is going to give the party. Christina Mander, George’s secretary, says that is quite the new way of doing things, and she has been about a great deal, and ought to know.

Miss Mander is a lady. She is very thin, one of those lath-and-plaster women, you know, that seem to live to support a small waist that is their greatest beauty, but when we first knew her, she was plump and jolly-looking. We practically got her for George. Years ago, when we were quite little and had had measles, we were sent down to a sort of boarding-house at Ramsgate to an old lady, an ex-dresser in some theatre Aunt Gerty knew, and who could neither see to mend or to keep us in order, though she got thirty shillings a week for doing it. They never got us up till nine; I suppose the slavey thought sufficient for the day was the evil thereof, and tried to make the evil’s day as short as possible. One morning when it was quite nine, and the sun was shining in, Ariadne and I were feeling frightfully bored, so we got up in our night-gowns, moved a wardrobe, and found a door behind it into another house. It was quite a smart house, with soft plush carpets and nicely-varnished yellow doors. We went all over it. Only the cat was awake, licking herself in the window-seat. The bedroom doors were all shut except one, and we went in and found a nice girl in bed with her gold hair all spread over the pillow. She didn’t seem shocked at us, but laughed, and when we had explained, she wished us to get into the bed beside her. It had sheets trimmed with lace, and her initials, C. M., on the pillow. We did this every morning till we went away. She kept us up, afterwards sending us Christmas cards and so on, and when George advertised for a secretary to help him to sub-edit Wild Oats, she answered it, among the thousand others, and we remembered her name and made George engage her.

She had been to Girton, and to a journalistic school, and Mr. D’Auban’s dancing academy, and to Klondike—where all her hair got cut off, so that she hasn’t enough to spread over the pillow now—and behind the scenes at a music-hall, and a month on the stage, and edited a paper once and wrote a novel. All before she was thirty! At every new arrangement for amusement she made her people opposed her, and prayed for her in church. But she always got her own way in the end. Her mother, Mrs. Stephen Cadwallis Mander, came here to sniff about when George first took Christina on. She is a woman of the world, tortoise-shell pince-nez