“Oh, her Thursdays—­no, I haven’t.”

“Well, how can you expect—­but you’ll go sometimes, now, to please me?”

“Won’t Wednesdays do?”

“Wednesdays?”

“Yes.  It wasn’t half bad to-night.  I’ll go to every blessed Wednesday, as long as they last, if you’ll only let me off Thursdays.”

“Please don’t talk about being ‘let off.’  I thought you might like to know my friends, that’s all.”

“So I would.  I’d like it awfully.  By the way, that reminds me.  I met Hannay at the club to-night, and he asked if his wife might call on you.  Would you mind very much?”

“Why should I mind, if she’s a friend of yours and Edith’s?”

“Oh well, you see, she isn’t exactly—­”

“Isn’t exactly what?”

“A friend of Edith’s.”

CHAPTER VI

There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century, when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young.  Each claims to be the aristocratic centre of the town.  Each acknowledges the other as its solitary peer.  If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston Square.  There are a few old families left in Scale.  They inhabit either Thurston Square or Prior Street.  There is nowhere else that they could live with any dignity or comfort.  In either place they are secure from the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide invading foot of the newly rich.  These build themselves mansions after their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the suburbs.  They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street and Thurston Square.

Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence.  But its atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on the unlovely and unsacred street.

Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved with cobble stones.  It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and of leisure.  It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed breath as of a cathedral close.  Its inhabitants pride themselves on this immemorial calm.  The older families rely on it for the sustenance of their patrician state.  They sit by their firesides in dignified attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert.  Their whole being is a religious protest against the spirit of business.

But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least.  They utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.

Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation, punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it.  Thursday is Mrs. Eliott’s day.