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her loins for the confrontation at hand.
    She had already rung the porter, instructing him to summon Mary Mabel and her father to the office. They’d be there this very moment, sweating. Let them sweat. An hour more and she’d descend to tell that brat, in no uncertain terms, that in the laying-on of hands she had exhibited inappropriate behaviour, and in so doing had threatened the hard-earned reputation for sobriety and moral rectitude of the Bentwhistle Academy, indeed of the Bentwhistle family itself. Let the trumpet sound. There would be hell to pay, with Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle, B.A., the instrument of God’s will.
    Hmm. There seemed to be more of her today than there was yesterday, an observation Miss Bentwhistle had been making with frightening regularity. “I look like a teapot!” she exclaimed, surveying her Rubenesque charms.
    She hoisted her corset: “Deny and contain!” The motto of her late father, Horatio Algernon Bentwhistle V. If he had overcome scandal, Miss Bentwhistle determined, so could she. Wrestling with laces and clasps, she drew strength from the great man’s battle with the clutch of elderly widows who’d sought his ruin. East-enders , Miss Bentwhistle sniffed. What right had they to do business with a Bentwhistle in the first place?
    The vixens had asked her father to put their money in government bonds. More wisely, he’d invested the funds in stocks, depositing profits equal to bond interest in their accounts while pocketing the balance in his own. These transactions went unnoticed during the run-up to the Great Crash; but when the market collapsed, taking the widows’ money with it, they’d had the effrontery to charge him with fraud.
    Lesser mortals might have crumbled. But not the Bentwhistle paterfamilias ! “Deny and contain!” Horatio had bellowed and headed to the court house. He claimed — and who could doubt it? — that the widows had insisted he speculate wildly. “They were thrill seekers; desperadoes, the lot of them.” And why had he withheld profits in excess of interest? “It was for their good that I sequestered the dividends. Otherwise those insatiable grannies would have run hog-wild, squandering the treasure of their declining years on trifles.”
    Oh, how the little people howled for his blood. But as their betters well knew: wealth is the backbone of virtue; the wealthy, models of probity. Judge Benjamin T. Vanderdander, a fellow Tory and one-time school chum, found for the defence: “In the absence of written instructions, the charges are without merit or foundation.”
    Horatio promptly sued the widows for libel. Unable to afford a competent lawyer, they were found guilty and sent to the slammer.
    Miss Bentwhistle indulged a smile remembering her father’s boozy victory party, following which he’d died “happily in his sleep,” as the Free Press put it, when the car he was driving crashed into a telephone pole. His venerable remains, eulogized by the premier and local dignitaries, were trundled to the family mausoleum in a horse-drawn carriage led by the Royal London Regimental Pipe Band whose members, in addition to comforting the bereaved with “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes, intercepted pensioners throwing rotten eggs concealed beneath their hankies. The poor can be so spiteful.
    Winched into her corset, Miss Bentwhistle waddled to the vanity table to complete her transformation to Dowager Empress. The only problem was sitting down, next to which breathing was a positive snap. She consoled herself that a wince of discomfort from corsets or gas can pass for displeasure and may actually be of assistance when dealing with the help.
    A heavy application of alabaster pancake to fill the crevasses, followed by a blush of rouge, a streak of mascara, a tease of lipstick, a dusting of lavender powder, and Miss Bentwhistle had made her face. It was a monument to authority, precisely the sort of countenance to squash a bug like Mary Mabel