"China, Ruth, and I'll have some more too. I don't know whether His Impudence is coming in or not; he's gadding off somewhere, I expect.... But you weren't only _pretending_ just now, were you, auntie?----"
She put the plug of the spirit-kettle into the wall.
"Well, how are the Bits?" Lady Tasker asked....
(Perhaps "His Impudence" and "The Bits" require explanation. Both expressions Dorothy had from her "maid," Ruth Mossop. "Maid" is thus written because Ruth was a young widow, who, after a series of disciplinary knockings-about by the late Mr. Mossop, was not over-troubled with maternal anxiety for the four children he had left her with. When asked by Dorothy whether she would prefer to be called Mrs. Mossop or Ruth, Mrs. Mossop had chosen the latter name, giving as her reason that it had been like Mr. Mossop's impudence to ask her to accept the other name at all; and very many other memories also, brooded on and gloomily loved, including the four children, had been bits of Mr. Mossop's impudence. Stan had adopted the phrase, finding in it chuckles of his own; and so His Impudence he had become, and Noel and Jackie the fruits thereof.)
Dorothy put her fair head on one side, as if she considered the absent Bits critically and dispassionately, and really thought that on the whole she might venture to approve of them.
"Ra-ther little dears; but oh, Heaven, how _are_ we going to manage with a third!"
Her aunt dissociated herself from the problem with a shrug.--"Well--if Stan will persist in thinking that his dressing-room is merely a room for him to dress in----"
"So I tell him," Dorothy murmured, with great meekness. "But--but flats aren't made for children. We did manage to seize the estate agent's little office for a nursery when all the flats were let, but when Stan brings a man home we have to sleep him in the dressing-room as it is--," (Lady Tasker shook her head, but the words "Wrong man" were hardly audible), "--and a house will mean stair-carpets, and hall furniture, and I don't know what else. Besides, Stan hasn't time to look for one----"
"He really hasn't, poor boy," Dorothy protested. "And he's after something really good this time--Fortune and Brooks, the what-d'-you-call-'ems, in Pall Mall----"