‘You know nothing about it,’ said Fergus.
‘Well, but you’ve never told me about school--how you are placed, and whom you are under.’
‘Oh! I’m in middle form, under Miss Edgar. Disgusting! It’s only the third form that go up to Smiler. She knows it is no use to try to take Stebbing and Burfield.’
‘And, Gill,’ added Val, ‘I’m in second class too, and I took three places for knowing where Teheran was, and got above Kitty Varley and a girl there two years older than I am, and her name is Maura.’
‘Maura, how very odd! I never heard of any one called Maura but one of the Whites,’ said Gillian. ‘What was her surname?’
This Valetta could not tell, and at the moment Mrs. Mount came up with intent to brush Miss Valetta’s hair, and to expedite the going to bed.
Gillian, not very happy about the revelations she had heard, went downstairs, and found her younger aunt alone, Miss Mohun having been summoned to a conference with one of her clients in the parish room. In her absence Gillian always felt more free and communicative, and she had soon told whatever she did not feel as a sort of confidence, including Valetta’s derivation of spooning, and when Miss Mohun returned it was repeated to her.
‘Yes,’ was her comment, ‘children’s play is a convenient cover to the present form of flirtation. No doubt Bee Varley and Mr. Marlowe believe themselves to have been most good-natured.’
‘Who is he, and will it come to anything?’ asked Aunt Ada, taking her sister’s information for granted.
‘Oh no, it is nothing. A civil service man, second cousin’s brother-in-law’s stepson. That’s quite enough in these days to justify fraternal romping.’
‘So she is, my dear. It is only the spirit of the age, and, after all, this deponent saith not which was the dish and which was the spoon. Have the children made any other acquaintances, I wonder? And how did George Stebbing comport himself in the omnibus? I was sorry to see him there; I don’t trust that boy.’
‘I wonder they didn’t send him in solitary grandeur in the brougham,’ said Miss Ada.
Gillian held the history of the pea-shooting as a confidence, even though Aunt Jane seemed to have been able to see through the omnibus, so she contented herself with asking who George Stebbing was.