S6 The Real Charlotte. 



fixed upon his plate, only responding to Miss Mullen's 

 frequent references to him by a sarcastic grunt. 



" Now I assure you, Miss Dysart, it's perfectly true," said 

 Charlotte, after one of these polite rejoinders. ^' He's too 

 lazy to say so, but he knows right well that when I com- 

 plained of my kitchen-maid to her mother, all the good I 

 got from her was that she said, * Would ye iDe agin havin' a 

 switch and to be switchin' her ! ' That was a pretty way 

 for me to spend my valuable time." Her audience laughed; 

 and inspired by another half glass of champagne, Miss 

 Mullen continued, " But big a fool as Bid Sal is, she's a 

 Solon beside Donovan. He came to me th' other day and 

 said he wanted * little Johanna for the garden.' ' Little 

 who ? * says I ; ' Little Johanna,' says he. ' Ye great, lazy 

 fool,' says I, ' aren't ye big enough and ugly enough to do 

 that little pick of work by yerself without wanting a girl to 

 help ye?* And after all," said Charlotte, dropping from 

 the tones of fury in which she had rendered her own part 

 in the interview, " all he wanted was some guano for my 

 early potatoes ! " 



Lambert got up without a smile, and sauntering down to 

 the lake, sat down on a rock and began to smoke a cigar. 

 He could not laugh as Christopher and even Captain 

 Cursiter did, at Charlotte's dramatisation of her scene with 

 her gardener. At an earlier period of his career he had 

 found her conversation amusing, and he had not thought 

 her vulgar. Since then he had raised himself just high 

 enough from the sloughs of Irish middle-class society to see 

 its vulgarity, but he did not stand sufficiently apart from it 

 to be able to appreciate the humorous side, and in any 

 case he was at present little disposed to laugh at anything. 

 He sat and smoked morosely for some time, feeling that he 

 was making his dissatisfaction with the entertainment im- 

 posingly conspicuous ; but his cigar was a failure, the rock 

 was far from comfortable, and his bereaved friends seemed 

 to be enjoying themselves rather more than when he left 

 them. He threw the cigar into the water in front of him, 

 to the consternation of a number of minnows, who had hung 

 in the warm shallow as if listening, and now vanished in a 

 twinkling to spread among the dark resorts of the elder 

 ^shes the tale of the thunderbolt that fell in their midst, 



