Leonetta laughed. "Well, I like that!" she cried. "I wasn't too young last night, was I?"
"Why, what happened last night?" Vanessa enquired, without revealing a trace of envy in her inscrutable Jewish eyes.
"Oh, well, never mind. I suppose I ought to say the night before last. But, anyhow, Lord Henry is not forty. I asked him. He's only thirty-three."
"Well, I'm only repeating what Denis said," Vanessa observed.
"I know one thing, Lord Henry's jolly clever. Do you know what it is to feel your skin creep all over while anybody's talking to you even about simple subjects?"
"Yes—rather!"
"Well, that's what Lord Henry makes me feel. And what's more, he has a ripping way of putting things scientifically to you. He never flatters you. He proves to you on scientific principles that you are one of the best,—do you understand?"
Vanessa was delighted, and, strange as it may seem, so was Leonetta; an unusual coincidence of sentiment in these two flappers—for Vanessa had not long ceased from being a flapper—which foreboded no good to any one.
The following day broke dull and wet for the inhabitants of Brineweald, and for the first hour of the morning the rain was sufficiently heavy to keep the two households apart.