Robert Lorillard! Why, the very name is a thrill!
Of course I was in love with Robert Lorillard when I was seventeen, just before the war. Everybody was in love with him that year. It was the fashionable thing to be. Whenever Grandmother let me come up to town I went to the theatre to adore dear Robert. Women used to boast that they'd seen him fifty times in some favourite play. But never did he act on the stage so stirring a part as that thrust upon him in August, 1914! I must let the girl with the letter wait while I tell you the story, in case you've not heard the true version.
While she hung upon my decision, and I gazed at Lorillard's signature (worth guineas as an autograph), my mind raced back along the years.
Oh, that gorgeous spring before the war!
I wasn't "out"; but somehow I contrived to be "in." That is, in all the things that I'd have died rather than miss.
We were absurdly poor, but Grandmother knew everyone; and that April, while she was looking for a town house and arranging to present me, we stayed with the Duchess of Stane. Her daughter, Lady June, was the girl in Society just then. She had been The Girl for several years. She was the prettiest, the most original, and the most daring one in her set. She wasn't twenty-three, but she'd picked up the most extraordinary reputation! I should think there could hardly have been more interest in the doings of "professional beauties" in old days than was taken in hers. No illustrated weekly was complete without her newest portrait done by the photographer of the minute; no picture Daily existed that wouldn't pay well for a snapshot of Lady June Dana, even with a foot out of focus, or a hand as big as her head! And she loved it all! She lived, lived every minute! It didn't seem as if there could be a world without June.
I was only a flapper, but I worshipped at the shrine, and the goddess didn't mind being worshipped. She used to let me perch on her bed when she took her morning tea, looking a dream in a rosebud-wreathed bit of tulle called a boudoir cap, and a nighty like the first outline sketch for a ballgown. She reeled off yards of stuff for my benefit about the men who loved her (their name was legion!), and among others was Robert Lorillard.
All the clever people who "did" things came to Stane House, provided they were good to look at and interesting in themselves. Lorillard was there nearly every Sunday for luncheon, and at other times, too. I couldn't help staring at him, though I knew it was rude, for he was so handsome, so—almost divine!
One laughs at writers who make their heroes "Greek statues," but really Lorillard was like the Apollo Belvedere, in the Vatican: those perfect features, that high yet winning air (someone has said) "of the greatest statue that ever was a gentleman, the greatest gentleman that ever was a statue."
I think June met Lorillard away from home often: and once, when Grandmother and I had gone to live in our own house, and I'd been presented, June took me behind the scenes after a matinée at his theatre. He was charming to me, and I loved him more than ever, with that delicious, hopeless, agonizing love of seventeen.