"As I found out where you'd gone, I thought it would sort of look better, eh, for me to fetch you? Didn't mean to be a bore or anything."
"Oh, Savile dear, thank you! I'll never——"
"Yes; it's not going to happen again. Go and dress, old girl. Wear your pink. Motor'll be round in half an hour; heaps of time. I'm going too, you know—at Aunt William's."
CHAPTER XIII
AT MRS. OGILVIE'S
"I know what's the matter with you, Vera," said Felicity decidedly, as she sat down in her friend's flat in Cadogan Place. "It's that you haven't got the personal note!"
"I?" said Vera indignantly.
Mrs. Ogilvie was a very pretty dark woman of about thirty, who minimised her good looks and added to her apparent age by dressing in the style which had always suited her. Her dainty drawing-rooms were curiously conventional—the natural result of carte-blanche to a fashionable upholsterer. She wore a blue-green Empire [tea-gown], a long chain of uncut turquoises, a scarab ring, and a curious comb in her black, loose hair, and was always trying, and always trying in vain, to be unusual. Her name was Lucy (as any one who understood the subject of names must have seen at a glance), but she had changed it to Vera, on the ground that it was more Russian. There seemed no special object in this, as she had married a Scotchman. One really rare possession she certainly had—a husband who, notwithstanding that he felt a mild dislike for her merely, bullied her and interfered with her quite as much as if he were wildly in love. He was a rising barrister, and nearly every evening Vera had to undergo a very cross examination as to what she had done during the day, while being only too well aware that he neither listened to her answers, nor would have been interested if he had.