"
Lucia gave her silvery laugh.
"_Georgino_, you are a boy," she said artfully, "and 'tuck in' as
you so vulgarly call it without thinking, I'm saying nothing against
the supper, but I'm sure that Peppino and Colonel Boucher would have
felt better this morning if they had been wiser last night. But that's
not the real point. I want to show Miss Bracely, and I'm sure she will
be grateful for it, the sort of entertainment that has contented us at
Riseholme for so long. I will frame it on her lines; I will ask all and
sundry to drop in with just a few hours' notice, as she did. Everything
shall be good, and there shall be about it all something that I seemed
to miss last night. There was a little bit--how shall I say it?--a
little bit of the footlights about it all. And the footlights didn't
seem to me to have been extinguished at church-time this morning. The
singing of that very fine aria was theatrical, I can't call it less
than theatrical."
She fixed Georgie with her black beady eye, and smoothed her undulated
hair.
"Theatrical," she said again. "Now let us have our coffee in the
music-room. Shall Lucia play a little bit of Beethoven to take out
any nasty taste of gramophone? Me no likey gramophone at all. Nebber!"
Georgie now began to feel himself able to sympathise with that
surfeited swain who thought how happy he could be with either, were
t'other dear charmer away.
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