DARK HESTER
afternoon, up at The Crofts.—What sort of people owned it? Their ideas of decoration were absolutely grisly.—We shall have to scrape it—inside and out—beginning with the rockery!’
‘Oh—the rockery! Poor dears!—It was the pride of their lives! They said to me, when they were going: “At all events we are leaving the new people a lovely rockery!”’ Celia laughed again, taking the chair that Clive placed for her. ‘It is bad, of course; but it has some nice things on it—don’t scrape too ruthlessly:—and they were rather dears, and had a darling cat!’ Celia was talking with a touch of her headlong girlish manner. Hester confused her a little, and Mr. Gales’s cheerfully admiring gaze. ‘A yellow Tom, you know,” she said, ‘with blue eyes.’
Mrs. Jessup was also surveying her, but not admiringly, seeing in her, Monica imagined, a trivial example of the capitalistic drone. ‘A cat? And what have they done with it?’ she demanded. ‘People who have a stained-glass Romeo and Juliet in their lavatory window might have been capable of turning their cat out to starve, I feel!—I don’t need to be told what sort of people they were, Hester!’
‘Try some of these cakes, Celia.’ Clive placed
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