"What's all this? What's all this?" broke in the cheerful, unabashed voice of Miss Vi Vassity.
That lady had broken away from her theatrical friends—young men with soft hats and clean-cut features—and, accompanied by her usual inevitable jingle of gold hanging charms and toys and knick-knacks—had turned to me.
She caught my arm in her plump, white-gloved hand and beamed good-naturedly upon my frozen aunt.
"Who's your lady friend, Smithie, my dear?" demanded London's Love, who had never looked more showily vulgar.
The grimy background of street and police-court walls seemed to throw up the sudden ins-and-outs of her sumptuous, rather short-legged figure, topped by that glittering hair and finished off by a pair of fantastically high-heeled French boots of the finest and whitest kid.
No wonder my fastidious aunt gazed upon her with that petrified look!
London's Love didn't seem to see it. She went on gaily: "Didn't half fill the stalls, our party this morning, what, what? Might have been 'some' divorce case! Now for a spot of lunch to wash it all down. We're all going on to the Cecil. Come on, Jim," to Mr. Burke.
"Come on—I didn't catch your boy's name, Miss Smith—yours, I mean," tapping the arm of Mr. Reginald Brace, who looked very nearly as frozen as my aunt herself. "Still, you'll come. And you, dear?"
This to no less a person than Miss Anastasia Lovelace.
"This is my aunt, Miss Lovelace," I put in hurriedly. "Aunt Anastasia, this is Miss Vassity, who, as you said, was kind enough to—to go bail for us just now in court——"