But to Sylvia’s boundless surprise a messenger-boy arrived with an urgent invitation for her to come too.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured. “What does it mean? She surely can’t be tired of being a countess already. I’m completely stumped. However, of course we’ll put on our clean bibs and go. Don’t look so frightened. Olive, if conversation hangs fire at lunch, we’ll tickle the footmen.”
“I really feel quite faint,” said Olive. “My heart’s going pitter-pat. Isn’t it silly of me?”
Lunch, to which Arthur Lonsdale had also been invited, did nothing to enlighten Sylvia about the Clarehavens’ change of attitude. Dorothy, more beautiful than ever and pleasant enough superficially, seemed withal faintly resentful; Clarehaven was in exuberant spirits and evidently enjoying London tremendously. The only sign of tension, well not exactly tension, but slight disaccord, and that was too strong a word, was once when Clarehaven, having been exceptionally rowdy, glanced at Dorothy a swift look of defiance for checking him.
“She’s grown as prim as a parlor-maid,” said Lonsdale to Sylvia when, after lunch, they had a chance of talking together. “You ought to have seen her on the ancestral acres. My mother, who presides over our place like a Queen Turnip, is without importance beside Dolly, absolutely without importance. It got on Tony’s nerves, that’s about the truth of it. He never could stand the land. It has the same effect on him as the sea has on some people. Black vomit, coma, and death—what?”
“Dorothy, of course, played the countess in real life as seriously as she would have played her on the stage. She was the star,” Sylvia said.
“Star! My dear girl, she was a comet. And the dowager loved her. They used to drive round in a barouche and administer gruel to the village without anesthetics.”
“I suppose they kept them for Clarehaven,” Sylvia laughed.
“That’s it. Of course, I shouted when I saw the state of affairs, having first of all been called in to recover old Lady Clarehaven’s reason when she heard that her only child was going to wed a Vanity girl. But they loved her. Every frump in the county adored her. It’s Tony who insisted on this move to London. He stood it in Devonshire for two and a half years, but the lights of the wicked city—soft music, please—called him, and they’ve come back. Dolly’s fed up to the wide about it. I say, we are a pair of gossips. What’s your news?”
“I met Maurice Avery, in Morocco.”