"Thet's right, dearie."

Peony was not in her first youth, in fact she was comfortably into her
second. Her voice was so beautiful that it almost made one shy, but her
choice of language, tending as it did in the other direction, reassured
one. She had fine eyes of an absolute grey, and dark hair parted in the
middle and drawn down so as to make a triangle of a face which, left to
itself, would have been square. Her teeth spoilt her; the gaps among
them looked like the front row of the stalls during the first scene of
a revue, or the last scene of a play by Shakspere. On the whole, she
looked like the duckling of the story, serenely conscious of a secret
swanhood. She showed unnatural energy even in repose, and lived as
though she had a taxi waiting at the door.

"Who's Elbert?" asked Sarah Brown, and then wished she had not asked,
for even without Peony's flush she should have guessed.

"'Arf a mo, kiddie, till I get rid of the milkman. Come an' sit on the
stairs, an' I'll tell you a tale. I like no end tellin' this tale."

Harold the Broomstick was desultorily sweeping the stairs. He worked
harder when first conscious of being watched, but seeing that they
intended to stay there, on the top step, he made this the excuse to
disappear indolently, leaving little heaps of dust on several of the
lower steps.

"I come across Elbert first when I was about eight an' twenty," said
Peony, when Sarah Brown, in rather a loud dressing-gown, had taken her
seat on the stairs beside her. "Elbert was the ideel kid, an'
me--nothing to speak of. Nothin' more than a lump o' mud, I use to say.