“It made me feel so powerful,” she murmured. “The others thought me simply wonderful and of course it would have been very nice for them to have me. But I’m everything you most dislike and disapprove of, and yet you couldn’t withstand me! My vanity couldn’t hold out against that. It’s so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in their cap. I make you frightfully uncomfortable and stir you up the wrong way the whole time, and yet you adore me madly. You adore me madly, don’t you?”
“Naturally I am very fond of you, my dear.”
“Oh! Len, you adore me. Do you remember that day when I stayed up in town and sent you a wire you never got because the postmistress’s sister was having twins and she forgot to send it round? The state you got into and you telephoned Scotland Yard and made the most frightful fuss.”
There are things one hates being reminded of. I had really been strangely foolish on the occasion in question. I said:
“If you don’t mind, dear, I want to get on with the C.E.M.S. ”
Griselda gave a sigh of intense irritation, ruffled my hair up on end, smoothed it down again, said:
“You don’t deserve me. You really don’t. I’ll have an affair with the artist. I will—really and truly. And then think of the scandal in the parish.”
“There’s a good deal already,” I said mildly.
Griselda laughed, blew me a kiss, and departed through the window.