"So many women are affected cats.

She'll go out and buy you a box of pills or a porous plaster, but at the same time she has a kind of simplicity and freedom from spites and envies which might be the natural thing for a princess." So it happened that occasionally Emily put on her best dress and most carefully built hat and went to South Audley Street to tea.

(Sometimes she had previously gone in buses to some remote place in the City to buy a special tea of which there had been rumours.) She met some very smart people and rarely any stupid ones, Lady Maria being incased in a perfect, frank armour of good-humoured selfishness, which would have been capable of burning dulness at the stake.
"I won't have dull people," she used to say.

"I'm dull myself." When Emily Fox-Seton went to her on the morning in which this story opens, she found her consulting her visiting-book and making lists.
"I'm arranging my parties for Mallowe," she said rather crossly.

"How tiresome it is! The people one wants at the same time are always nailed to the opposite ends of the earth.