Too Old for Dolls: A Novel

by Anthony M. Ludovici

Sir Joseph did as he was bid, lingered tenderly over the handshake, and gazed with strained sympathy into his companion's healthy face.

"Younger than ever!" he exclaimed, "but not very well I fear."

He was accustomed to Mrs. Delarayne's occasional affectation of valetudinarian peevishness, alleged ill-health as a fact. As a rule it was the prelude to the request for a favour on a grand scale, and being a man of very great wealth, and therefore somewhat tight-fisted, he was always rendered unusually solemn by his friend's fits of indisposition.

They chatted idly for a while; Mrs. Delarayne gradually receding from the position of one on the verge of a dangerous malady, to that of a person merely threatened with a serious breakdown if her worries were not immediately made to cease.

It was a strange relationship that united these two people. Although Sir Joseph was not more than five years the lady's senior, she always treated him as if he belonged to a previous geological period; and he, chivalrously shouldering the burden of æons, had acquired the courteous habit of opening all his anecdotal pronouncements with such words as: "You would not remember old so-and-so," or "You cannot be expected to remember the days when";—a formality which, while it delighted Mrs. Delarayne, convinced her more and more that although Sir Joseph might make an excellent ancestor, it would have been an indignity for a woman of her years to accept him as a lover.

Sir Joseph had already been married once, and it had been the mistake of his life. Before he could have had the shadow of a suspicion that he was even to be an immensely wealthy man, he had, out of sentiment, taken a woman of his own class whom he had found somewhere in the Midlands. With her decease Sir Joseph, who was rapidly becoming a substantial and important member of society, hoped that his lowly past had died also; and when from the window of the first coach he watched the hearse bearing his wife swing round through the gates of the cemetery, he mentally recorded the resolution that on that day all uncertain syntax, all abuse and neglect of aspirates, and all Midland slang should be banished from his house for ever. He had loved his wife, but he frankly acknowledged to his soul that her death had been opportune; and as her coffin was lowered into the grave, he could not help muttering the thought, "Here also lies Bad Grammar. R.I.P."

Now compared with the late Mrs. Bullion, Mrs. Delarayne seemed to Sir Joseph a paragon of brilliance. She had dazzled him from the moment of their first meeting, and she continued to do so without effort, or, it must be admitted, without malicious intent either. Here was a woman who could be an honour to a wealthy man, who could gratify his lust for display, and carry the convincing proofs of his great wealth right under the noses of the very best people, without ever provoking the usual comments of the spiteful and the envious. She was a creature, moreover, with a large circle of influential and distinguished friends, and she possessed that inimitable calmness of bearing in their company, beside which Sir Joseph's mental picture of the first Mrs. Bullion partook of the mobility of a cinematograph or of a Catherine wheel in full action.

Mrs. Delarayne on the other hand had, as we have already seen, tutored herself into regarding Sir Joseph simply as a venerable old relic. In her fifty-fifth year this brave lady held very decided views about youth and age, and was very far from admitting that a man five years her senior was the only possible match for her. Indeed it was only the presence of her daughters that for some time past had prevented her from seriously contemplating and arranging a very different kind of match. Since their father's death she had schooled them into calling her "Edith"; she had also succeeded by means of certain modifications in her appearance, not confined entirely to her raiment and her coiffure, in creating the illusion of thirty; and everything she said and did was calculated to confirm this process of self-deception. She loathed old age. The very breath of an old person in the room in which she sat was enough to oppress and stifle her. It always struck her that the bitter smell of corpses was not far distant from the couch whereon they reclined. She wanted youth. Rightly or wrongly she thought she was entitled to the best, and who will deny that youth is the best? She was devotedly attached to young men. She would have required a good deal of persuasion to believe that a man of thirty was too young for her; and if she had deprived herself of this one luxury, it was, as we have seen, simply out of regard for her daughters. She entertained no rooted objection to disparity in ages as a matter of principle.

In the circumstances, Sir Joseph's senile raptures were simply tiresome, and had he not been enormously rich she would have thought them a little presumptuous. But there were many ways in which Sir Joseph Bullion's friendship proved useful to her. He was not only a wealthy man, he was also highly influential, and again and again she had used him and his power for her own private purposes.

She proposed to use him again on this occasion.