Patricia Brent, Spinster

Patricia Brent is a paying guest at the Galvin House Residential Hotel. One day she overhears two of her fellow guests pitying her because she never has a nice young man to take her out.
In a thoughtless moment of anger she announced that on the following night she is dining at the Quadrant with her fiancé. When in due course she enters the grill-room, she finds some of Galvin Houseites there to watch her. Rendered reckless by the thought of the humiliation of being found out, she goes up to a young staff-officer, and asks him to help her by playing up.
This is how she meets Lt.-Col. Lord Peter Bowen, D.S.O. The story is a comedy concerned with the complications that ensue from Patricia's thoughtless act.

She never has anyone to take her out, and goes nowhere, and yet she can't be more than twenty-seven, and really she's not bad-looking.
It's not looks that attract men, there was a note of finality in the voice; it's something else. The speaker snapped off her words in a tone that marked extreme disapproval.
What else? enquired the other voice.
Oh, it's—well, it's something not quite nice, replied the other voice darkly, the French call it being très femme . However, she hasn't got it.
Well, I feel very sorry for her and her loneliness. I am sure she would be much happier if she had a nice young man of her own class to take her about.
Patricia Brent listened with flaming cheeks. She felt as if someone had struck her. She recognised herself as the object of the speakers' comments. She could not laugh at the words, because they were true. She was lonely, she had no men friends to take her about, and yet, and yet——
Twenty-seven, she muttered indignantly, and I was only twenty-four last November.
She identified the two speakers as Miss Elizabeth Wangle and Mrs. Mosscrop-Smythe.