“There wasn’t any need for you to worry yourself,” he said hotly. “Stella had no business to scare you with her prejudices.”
“Prejudices!” his mother repeated. “Prejudice is a very mild word for what she feels about this dreadful girl you want to marry.”
“But it is prejudice,” Michael insisted. “She knows nothing against her.”
“She knows a great deal.”
“How?” he demanded incredulously.
“You’d better read her letter to me. And I really must go and take off these furs. It’s stifling in London. So very much hotter than the Riviera.”
Mrs. Fane left him with Stella’s letter.
LONG’S HOTEL,
April 9.
Darling Mother,
When you get this you must come at once to London. You are the only person who can save Michael from marrying the most impossible creature imaginable. He had a stupid love-affair with her, when he was eighteen, and I think she treated him badly even then—I remember his being very upset about it in the summer before my first concert. Apparently he rediscovered her this winter, and for some reason or other wants to marry her now. He brought her down to Hardingham, and I saw then that she was a minx. Alan remembers her mother as a dreadful woman who tried to make love to him. Imagine Alan at eighteen being pursued!