“A crinoline,” Orlando helped her out with it (for the word had reached Blackfriars). Mrs. Bartholomew nodded. The tears were already running down her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were they not all of them weak women? wearing crinolines the better to conceal the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until denial was impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child? to bear fifteen or twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
“The muffins is keepin’ ’ot,” said Mrs. Bartholomew mopping up her tears, “in the liberry.”
And wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to a dish of muffins Orlando now sat down.
“The muffins is keepin’ ’ot in the liberry”—Orlando minced out the horrid cockney phrase in Mrs. Bartholomew’s refined cockney accents as she drank—but no, she detested the mild fluid—her tea. It was in this very room, she remembered, that Queen Elizabeth had stood astride the fireplace with a flagon of beer