"Oh, with your work." She set the flat iron back on the stove with great care, which in that workroom was the equivalent of another woman throwing it. "A guinea is not a wage. A wage is three shillings and a dinner. And nobody in Wormsley has ever told a story about three shillings and a dinner in their lives."
"He was perfectly plain about—"
"I am sure he was. I have no doubt whatever of that man's plainness, which is the only thing about this that gives me any comfort." Mrs. Locksley sat down. She did that about as often as she raised her voice. "Now attend to me: you will not be ruined that evening. You will be ruined afterwards, in this town, by degrees, by women who will not say a word to your face."
"I know it."
"You do not know it. You are two-and-twenty."
"Mrs. Locksley." Catherine sat down opposite her; she had never once done it before. "I sat on the floor at the assembly and mended a flounce while two women talked over my head about another woman's ruin. Nobody in that building looked at me all night except him. He asked me what I did, and he listened to the answer." She held her hands still in her lap. "I am not a fool. I know what he is, and I know what I am, and I know exactly what this town will make of a guinea. I am going anyway."
Mrs. Locksley looked at her for a while. "Your mother had that same voice," she said at last. "Twice in her life. And both times she was right, and both times it cost her." She got up and took the iron off the stove again. "Wear the gray. Take the good scissors. And Catherine: be home by one, and walk in at the front of this shop, not the back. If you creep, they will know there is something to creep about."
She came at 7:00. Farcourt on that Thursday had one thing about it that Catherine had never seen: the shutters of the drawing room were open, and there were candles in the windows. From the turn of the avenue, the front of the house had two squares of yellow light in it, like a face that has opened its eyes.
There was a fire in the drawing room, and nineteen candles, which Catherine counted later out of pure nerves. A chair stood at each side of the hearth with a small table beside each. On one stood a decanter and a glass. On the other, where nobody could possibly have put it by accident, stood a branch of three candles arranged for close work. He had thought about the light for a woman who would be sewing, and he had not mentioned it, and he did not mention it now.
They dined first in the small room at a table meant for four, with two footmen who had been given orders to be present and had not been given orders about what to do with their faces.
It was very bad. He asked her whether the road from Wormsley had been dry; she said it had. He asked whether she took wine, and she said not usually. There was a silence of perhaps twelve seconds while the soup was taken away. This was going to be a catastrophe, and they had four hours and a half of it left.
"Your Grace," she said, "may I say something out of my place?"
"I should be obliged."