ne maiden lady should
address another maiden lady as 'Bill'. My experience, as I have said,
may be incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in
exclusively spinster circles wilder customs than I am aware of. But
it seemed to me odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not
misunderstand the phrase), I should have been strongly impelled to
maintain at the time that the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', were by
no means pronounced with that upper-class intonation which, as I have
already said, had up to now characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation.
In fact, the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', would have been, I fancy,
unsuitable if pronounced with that upper-class intonation.

"I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more
surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in
hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright against
the door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still
knitting, and I supposed that this erect posture against the door was
only an eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended
departure.

"I said genially, 'I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must
really be going. I have--er--' I stopped here, for the words she
had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely
business-like, were such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I
think, natural and excusable. I have these words also noted down. I have
not the least idea of their meaning; so I have only been able to render
them phonetically. But she said," and Mr Shorter peered short-sightedly
at his papers, "she said: 'Chuck it, fat 'ead,' and she added something
that sounded like 'It's a kop', or (possibly) 'a kopt'. And then the
last cord, either of my sanity or the sanity of the universe, snapped
suddenly. My esteemed friend and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the
mantelpiece, said: 'Put 'is old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up
before you start jawin'. You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days
with this way of coin' things, har lar theater.'

"My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly
fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous
society of their own from which all others were excluded? I remembered
dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but
now, alas! rusty), I remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their
strange fem