SAVILE AND JASMYN
Savile had written asking Jasmyn Vere to see him on a matter of importance.
Jasmyn promptly and courteously made an appointment, and spent the intervening hours chuckling to himself at the solemn tone of the letter, and wondering what in Heaven's name the child could possibly want.
He received Savile in a kind of winter garden, or conservatory at the back of his house, and went to meet him with the most charming cordiality, to put the boy at his ease. He would have been rather surprised had he known that something about his reddish hair, and his mouth open with hospitable welcome against the green background, reminded the boy irresistibly of an amiable gold-fish.
"So delighted, dear boy, that you should have thought of me. Anything, of course, in the world that I could do for you, or for any of your charming family, I should look upon as a real privilege. Have a cigarette? You smoke, of course? You oughtn't to. Take this nice comfortable chair—not that one, it's horrid—and tell me all about it."
"Thanks, awfully," said Savile seriously, intensely amused at his host's nervous, elaborate politeness, and trying hard to repress the inclination to laugh that Jasmyn always inspired in him. How fluttered and flattered the dear old thing seemed! Savile wasn't a bit frightened of him.
"I knew you know all about things, Mr. Vere," said Savile, accepting a cigarette and a cushioned deck-chair, "and I thought I'd ask your advice about something."
Jasmyn was completely at a loss. Could it be a question of a tenner? It so often was. But no, he felt sure that it was nothing quite so commonplace, or quite so simple.
In a few minutes he had heard and thoroughly taken in the whole story.
He was most interested, and particularly sympathetic about Sylvia, though from his own point of view—the worldly social-conventional view—she ought to have done better. As he thought it over he walked up and down the winter garden.