"You will never persuade me, my dear, that you can cure anybody's attitude towards women by knocking off policemen's helmets----"
"I am convinced, Penelope, that I have seen a picture, in the _Daily Illustrated_, I think it was, of a woman knocking off a policeman's helmet. Her mouth was wide open, and she was doing it with an umbrella--a dreadful, ill-bred, unwomanly creature she looked! I remember it distinctly. The _Daily Illustrated_ is a most respectable paper; it would never----"
"Darling, you know you have told me over and over again how all the respectable papers of the day called Florence Nightingale a dreadful, unwomanly creature for wanting to go out to the war to nurse grown-up men without a chaperon, instead of staying at home to nurse the baby she hadn't got," shouted Penelope down the ear-trumpet.
"And so they did," cried her mother, as though her veracity were being called in question. "All sorts of wicked and untrue things were said about that noble woman, for whom I have the utmost veneration, because she taught me to air a room by opening the window a few minutes at the bottom instead of opening the door. Oh! it was shocking the things they said about her! But now----"
"Now," said the wily Penelope, "no woman in England is more honoured. That shows, doesn't it, that we should not believe everything the papers----"
"Penelope," said her mother abruptly, "I have dropped my ear-trumpet again, so you had better ring the bell for tea."
Signs of the fray were still evident when Sarah admitted me to the front drawing-room. The ear-trumpet was sticking out of the coal-box, always a sign of mental disturbance in Penelope's home; and both she and her mother were looking for the spectacles which had been swept momentarily out of existence.
"I cannot think what I did with them," complained Penelope's mother, as though her loss were not an hourly occurrence. "If you had not upset me so dreadfully, Penelope----"
Then she looked up and saw me, Sarah's lusty announcement of my name having passed over her unheeded through the temporary disablement of the ear-trumpet. With a royal gesture of her hand she banished eternal truths and their tiresome topical manifestations to oblivion, and received me in the grand manner that was designed, fifty years ago, to hide from visitors and servants alike that the head of the house ever had any private emotions or any public interests. Now, as then, it deceived nobody; but it bridged the gulf between eternal truths and afternoon tea very pleasantly.