"Allen, Grant - Miss Cayley's Adventures 01 - The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Grant)

utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies
were seated on the other side already--very grand-looking
dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the
English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank
hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager. They were
talking confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode
of my approach did not suffice to stem the full stream of
their conversation. The great ignore the intrusion of their
inferiors.

'Yes, it's a terrible nuisance,' the eldest and ugliest of
the two observed--she was a high-born lady, with a
distinctly cantankerous cast of countenance. She had a
Roman nose, and her skin was wrinkled like a wilted apple;
she wore coffee-coloured point-lace in her bonnet, with a
complexion to match. 'But what could I do, my dear? I
simply couldn't put up with such insolence. So I looked her
straight back in the face--oh, she quailed, I can tell you;
and I said to her, in my iciest voice--you know how icy I
can be when occasion demands it'--the second old lady nodded
an ungrudging assent, as if perfectly prepared to admit her
friend's rare gift of iciness--'I said to her, Celestine,
you can take your month's wages, and half an hour to get out
of this house." And she dropped me a deep reverence, and
she answered: Oui, madame, merci beaucoup, madame; je ne
desire pas mieux, madame." And out she flounced. So there
was the end of it.'

'Still, you go to Schlangenbad on Monday?'

'That's the point. On Monday. If it weren't for the
journey, I should have been glad enough to be rid of minx.
I'm glad as it is, indeed; for a more insolent upstanding,
independent, answer-you-back-again young woman, with a sneer
of her own, I never saw, Amelia--but I must get to
Schlangenbad. Now, there the difficulty comes in. On the
one hand, if I engage a maid in London, I have the choice of
two evils. Either I must take a trapesing English girl--and
I know by experience that an English girl on the Continent
is a vast deal worse than no maid at all: you have to wait
upon her, instead of her waiting upon you; she gets seasick
on the crossing, and when she reaches France or Germany,
she hates the meals, and she detests the hotel servants, and
she can't speak the language, so that she's always calling
you in to interpret for her in her private differences with
the fille-de-chambre and the landlord; or else I must pick
up a French maid in London, and I know equally by experience
that the French maids one engages in London are invariably
dishonest--more dishonest than the rest even; they've come
here because they have no character to speak of elsewhere,