But there could be no question that the room was too dark
for the taste of any householder clever enough to know the difference
between a house and a church.
There was a plunging noise at the door behind him.
"What's amiss?" he heard a woman's voice. And as he heard it he
thrilled with sympathetic vibrations. It was not a North Staffordshire
voice, but it was a South Yorkshire voice, which is almost the same
thing. It seemed to him to be the first un-Kensingtonian voice to
soothe his ear since he had left the Five Towns. Moreover, nobody born
south of the Trent would have said, "What's amiss?" A southerner
would have said, "What's the matter?" Or, more probably, "What's the
mattah?"
He turned and saw a breathless and very beautiful woman, of about
twenty-nine or thirty, clothed in black, and she was in the act
of removing from her lovely head what looked like a length of red
flannel. He noticed, too, simultaneously, that she was suffering
from a heavy cold. A majestic footman behind her closed the door and
disappeared.
"Are you Lady Woldo?" Edward Henry asked.
"Yes," she said. "What's this about my baby?"
"I've just seen him in Hyde Park," said Edward Henry. "And I observed
that a rash had broken out all over his face."
"I know that," she replied. "It began this morning, all of a sudden
like. But what of it? I was rather alarmed myself, as it's the first
rash he's had and he's the first baby I've had--and he'll be the last
too.
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