“Not a bit. I can hear you quite well. Why on earth did God give women such shrill voices? Though I don’t mind frightfully. It reminds me of native workmen quarrelling. They’re doing us rather well, don’t you think? Much better soup than we ever got.”
“They’ve made a special effort for Gaudy. Besides, the new Bursar’s rather good, I believe; she was something to do with Domestic Economy. Dear old Straddles had a mind above food.”
“Yes; but I liked Straddles. She was awfully decent to me when I got ill just before Schools. Do you remember?”
“What happened to Straddles when she left?”
“Oh, she’s Treasurer at Bronte College. Finance was really her line, you know. She had a real genius for figures.”
“And what became of that woman-what’s her name?- Peabody? Freebody?-you know-the one who always said solemnly that her great ambition in life was to become Bursar of Shrewsbury?”
“Oh, my dear! She went absolutely potty on some new kind of religion and joined an extraordinary sect somewhere or other where they go about in loin-cloths and have agapemones of nuts and grape-fruit. That is, if you mean Brodribb?”
“Brodribb-I knew it was something like Peabody. Fancy her of all people! So intensely practical and sub-fuse.”
“Reaction, I expect. Repressed emotional instincts and all that. She was frightfully sentimental inside, you know.”
“I know. She wormed round rather. Had a sort of G.P. for Miss Shaw. Perhaps we were all rather inhibited in those days.”
“Well, the present generation doesn’t suffer from that, I’m told. No inhibitions of any kind.”
“Oh, come, Phoebe. We had a good bit of liberty. Not like before Women’s Degrees. We weren’t monastic.”
“No, but we were born long enough before the War to feel a few restrictions. We inherited some sense of responsibility. And Brodribb came from a fearfully rigid sort of household-Positivists or Unitarians or Presbyterians or something. The present lot are the real War-time generation, you know.”
“So they are. Well, I don’t know that I’ve any right to throw stones at Brodribb.”
“Oh, my dear! That’s entirely different. One thing’s natural; the other’s-I don’t know, but it seems to me like complete degeneration of the grey matter. She even wrote a book.”
“About agapemones?”
“Yes. And the Higher Wisdom. And Beautiful Thought. That sort of thing. Full of bad syntax.”
“Oh, lord. Yes-that’s pretty awful, isn’t it? I can’t think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one’s grammar.”
“It’s a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I’m afraid. But which of them causes the other, or whether they’re both symptoms of something else, I don’t know. What with Trimmer’s mental healing, and Henderson going nudist-”No!”
“Fact. There she is, at the next table. That’s why she’s so brown.”
“And her frock so badly cut. If you can’t be naked, be as ill-dressed as possible, I suppose.”
“I sometimes wonder whether a little normal, hearty wickedness wouldn’t be good for a great many of us.”
At this moment. Miss Mollison, from three places away on the same side of the table, leaned across her neighbors and screamed something.
“What?” screamed Phoebe.
Miss Mollison leaned still further, compressing Dorothy Collins, Betty Armstrong and Mary Stokes almost to suffocation.
“I hope Miss Vane isn’t telling you anything too blood-curdling!”
“No said Harriet, loudly. ”Mrs. Bancroft is curdling my blood.”
“How?”
“Telling me the life-histories of our year.”
“Oh!” screamed Miss Mollison, disconcerted. The service of a dish of lamb and green peas intervened and broke up the formation, and her neighbors breathed again. But to Harriet’s intense horror, the question and reply seemed to have opened up an avenue for a dark, determined woman with large spectacles and rigidly groomed hair, who sat opposite to her, and who now bent over and said, in piercingly American accents: “I don’t suppose you remember me, Miss Vane? I was only in college for one term, but I would know you anywhere. I’m always recommending your books to my friends in America who are keen to study the British detective story, because I think they are just terribly good.”
“Very kind of you,” said Harriet, feebly.
“And we have a very dear mutooal acquaintance,” went on the spectacled lady.
Heavens! thought Harriet. What social nuisance is going to be dragged out of obscurity now? And who is this frightful female?
“Really?” she said, aloud, trying to gain time while she ransacked her memory. “Who’s that. Miss-”
“Schuster-Slatt” prompted Phoebe’s voice in her ear.
“Schuster-Slatt.” (Of course. Arrived in Harriet’s first summer term. Supposed to read Law. Left after one term because the conditions at Shrewsbury were too restrictive of liberty. Joined the Home Students, and passed mercifully out of one’s life.)
“How clever of you to know my name. Yes, well, you’ll be surprised when I tell you, but in my work I see so many of your British aristocracy.” Hell! thought Harriet. Miss Schuster-Slatt’s strident tones dominated even the surrounding uproar.
“Your marvellous Lord Peter. He was so kind to me, and terribly interested when I told him I was at college with you. I think he’s just a lovely man.”
“He has very nice manners,” said Harriet. But the implication was too subtle.
Miss Schuster-Slatt proceeded: “He was just wonderful to me when I told him all about my work.” (I wonder what it is, thought Harriet.) “And of course I wanted to hear all about his thrilling detective cases, but he was much too modest to say anything. Do tell me, Miss Vane, does he wear that cute little eyeglass because of his sight, or is it part of an old English tradition?”
“I never had the impertinence to ask him,” said Harriet.
“Now isn’t that just like your British reticence!” exclaimed Miss Schuster-Slatt; when Mary Stokes struck in with “Oh, Harriet, do tell us about Lord Peter! He must be perfectly charming if he’s at all like his photographs. Of course you know him very well, don’t you?”
“I worked with him over one case.”
“It must have been frightfully exciting. Do tell us what he’s like.”
“Seeing,” said Harriet, in angry and desperate tones, “seeing that he got me out of prison and probably saved me from being hanged, I am naturally bound to find him delightful.”
“Oh!” said Mary Stokes, flushing scarlet, and shrinking from Harriet’s furious eyes as if she had received a blow. “I’m sorry-I didn’t think-”
“Well, there,” said Miss Schuster-Slatt, “I’m afraid I’ve been very, very tactless. My mother always said to me, ‘Sadie, you’re the most tactless girl I ever had the bad luck to meet.’ But I am enthusiastic. I get carried away. I don’t stop to think. I’m just the same with my work. I don’t consider my own feelings; I don’t consider other people’s feelings. I just wade right in and ask for what I want, and I mostly get it.”
After which, Miss Schuster-Slatt, with more sensitive feeling than one might have credited her with, carried the conversation triumphantly away to the subject of her own work, which turned out to have something to do with the sterilization of the unfit, and the encouragement of matrimony among the intelligentsia.
Harriet, meanwhile, sat miserably wondering what devil possessed her to display every disagreeable trait in her character at the mere mention of Wimsey’s name. He had done her no harm; he had only saved her from a shameful death and offered her an unswerving personal devotion; and for neither benefit had he ever claimed or expected her gratitude. It was not pretty that her only return should be a snarl of resentment. The fact is, thought Harriet, I have got a bad inferiority complex; unfortunately, the fact that I know it doesn’t help me to get rid of it. I could have liked him so much if I could have met him on an equal footing…