"
"There are a few minor chances she ought to have," said Coombe.
"A governess is one. Mademoiselle Valle will be here at eleven."
"I can't see that she promises to be such a beauty," fretted
Feather. "She's the kind of good looking child who might grow up
into a fat girl with staring black eyes like a barmaid."
"Occasionally pretty women do abhor their growing up daughters,"
commented Coombe letting his eyes rest on her interestedly.
"I don't abhor her," with pathos touched with venom. "But a big,
lumping girl hanging about ogling and wanting to be ogled when she
is passing through that silly age! And sometimes you speak to me
as a man speaks to his wife when he is tired of her."
"I beg your pardon," Coombe said. "You make me feel like a person
who lives over a shop at Knightsbridge, or in bijou mansion off
Regent's Park."
But he was deeply aware that, as an outcome of the anomalous
position he occupied, he not infrequently felt exactly this.
That a governess chosen by Coombe--though he would seem not to
appear in the matter--would preside over the new rooms, Feather
knew without a shadow of doubt.
A certain almost silent and always high-bred dominance over her
existence she accepted as the inevitable, even while she fretted
helplessly. Without him, she would be tossed, a broken butterfly,
into the gutter. She knew her London.
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