Page:Rudyard Kipling - A diversity of creatures.djvu/291

Rh. Two portly men, half hidden by a cased harp, discussed, over sheaves of typewritten documents, the terms of some contract. A knot of matrons talked servants—Irish versus German—across the grand piano. A youth ravaged an old bookcase, while beside him a tall girl stared at the portrait of a woman of many loves, dead three hundred years, but now leaping to life and warning under the shaded frame-light. In a corner half-a-dozen girls examined the glazed tables that held the decorations—English and foreign—of the late Lord Marshalton.

'See heah! Would this be the Ordeh of the Gyartah?' one said, pointing.

'I presoom likely. No! The Garter has "Honey swore"—I know that much. This is "Tria juncta" something.'

'Oh, what's that cunning little copper cross with "For Valurr"?' a third cried.

'Say! Look at here!' said the young man at the bookcase. 'Here's a first edition of Handley Cross and a Beewick's Birds right next to it—just like so many best sellers. Look, Maidie!'

The girl beneath the picture half turned her body but not her eyes.

'You don't tell me!' she said slowly. 'Their women amounted to something after all.'

'But Woman's scope and outlook was vurry limmutted in those days,' one of the matrons put in, from the piano.

'Limutted? For her? If they whurr, I guess she was the limmut. Who was she? Peters, whurr's the cat'log?'