This was part of the business of looking after Miss Million.
We were at Piccadilly Circus when the young man at my side protested: "But we can't get in, you know! I'm not a member of this thing. I can't take you in, Miss Lovelace——"
"I'm Smith, the lady's-maid of one of the ladies who's in the club, and I've come to wait for my mistress," I told him. "That's perfectly simple. And I daresay it'll allow me to see something of what's going on!"
Here we drew up at a side street. It was half full of cars and taxis, half full with a rebuilding of scaffolding that made a tunnel over the basement.
The door of the club was beyond the scaffolding and a tall commissionaire, with a breast glittering with medals, opened and closed it with the movements of a punkah-wallah. Inside was red carpet and a blaze of lights and an inner glass door.
In this vestibule there was a little knot of men in chauffeurs' liveries, with wet gleaming on the shoulders of their coats, for an unexpected shower had just come on. I was glad of it. This gave me, too, my excuse for waiting there, when one of the attendants slipped up to me and looked inquiringly down at me in my correct, outdoor black things.
"I am to wait," I said, "for my mistress."
"Very good, Miss. Would you like a chair in the ladies' cloak-room?"
"No. I don't think she will be very long, thank you," I said. And I heard Mr. Brace, behind me, saying in his embarrassed, stiff, young voice: "I am waiting with this lady."
(The commissionaires and people must have thought that the little, chestnut-haired lady's-maid in black had got hold of a most superior sort of young man!)