Free Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp Page A

thing I did really bad was offering mayonaze again with the trifle, thinking custard. The Professor took some before Mr. Syrett saw but ate it up, we think perhaps being a foreigner he wouldn’t notice. But he speaks English like you or I. Her ladyship wore grey velvet though not low-necked, all the others in evening clothes just like the films. This is the brightest spot so far in my hard life. I hope you are quite well and not missing me too badly. It would be funny if after all these years you did not miss me at all. What I think is if you miss people why not say so .
    Your affectionate neice,
    C LUNY B ROWN

Chapter 8
    I
    The beauties of a Devonshire spring—exquisite in detail, splendid in broad effect—are too well known to require description. Natives, from old habit, keep their heads pretty well; they do not (as might be expected) unanimously down tools and give themselves up to admiration; but both Cluny and the Professor were powerfully affected. The latter’s sensibility made Lady Carmel like him all the more; she felt that a Devonshire spring was just the sort of thing a foreigner ought to see, and she determined that he should see it thoroughly. They took packets of sandwiches and tramped for miles, leaving Andrew and Sir Henry, who was no pedestrian, to face each other over the lunch table. The meal was usually a silent one, for Andrew, like many another young man of his generation, was extremely fond of his father but had nothing to say to him.
    â€œI’m glad your mother’s got some one to walk with,” observed Sir Henry. “I don’t like her going alone.”
    Andrew nodded, but without conviction. Lady Carmel, known to and revered by every man, woman and child within a radius of ten miles, could scarcely come to harm. She occasionally overtired herself, and then stopped the first vehicle going her way and asked for a lift. Once she came home in a char-à-banc, once sitting serenely on the front seat of a lorry. In a quiet way Lady Carmel was one of the pioneers of hitch-hiking in Great Britain.
    â€œYou didn’t go with ’em?” added Sir Henry.
    â€œLetters,” mumbled Andrew, avoiding his parent’s eye. On him too the season was having its effect—and so conventional a one that he instinctively repudiated it. But the Tennysonian jingle, like all platitudes, could not be denied: in the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. So Andrew’s thoughts had turned, though not lightly—so seriously, in fact, that he could not endure to contemplate a bank of primroses except in company with the beloved. This was all the more annoying to him because he had only just decided that far from being in love with Betty Cream, he rather disliked her, and she had therefore no business to pop out as it were from under the first violet. This horrid image produced a certain amount of revulsion, but not much.
    â€œPity the Duff-Graham girl’s away” said Sir Henry suddenly.
    â€œWhy?” asked Andrew.
    â€œWell, she’d be company for you,” said Sir Henry; and then, remembering several warnings of his wife’s, began to talk about trout.
    II
    Mr. Belinski’s reactions to the spring met with every encouragement; not so Cluny Brown’s. What was an asset in the guest became a liability in the parlour-maid: for only by scamping her work could Cluny spend enough time out of doors, and every day she scamped a bit more. She left hot-water bottles in the beds, and omitted to refill the carafes. She substituted Kia-Ora for Mr. Andrew’s orange juice. With real ingenuity, she dropped the key of the linen cupboard somewhere in the orchard, and had to spend a whole afternoon looking for it. Above all, she picked things. Every time she ran out she came back with her hands full—of catkins, violets, primroses, daffodils. Born and bred in London, she could not get over the fact that these were all there