“Jack, have you ever seen a respectable woman throw a sole Morny across a restaurant? Because you will in one moment. Amen to the whole discussion. Please! The only thing you’ve got to do is to insist on Olive’s coming with me. Then while she’s away you must be a good little actor and act away as hard as you know how, so that you can be married next June as a present to me on my twenty-sixth birthday.”
“You’re the greatest dear,” said Jack, fervently.
“Of course I am. But I’m waiting.”
“What for?”
“Why, for an exhortation to matrimony. Haven’t you noticed that people who are going to get married always try to persuade everybody else to come in with them? I’m sure human co-operation began with paleolithic bathers.”
So Olive and Sylvia left England for Sirene.
“I’d like to be coming with you,” said Mrs. Gainsborough at Charing Cross. “But I’m just beginning to feel a tiddley-bit stiff, and well, there, after Morocco, I shouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than a cannibal island, and it’s too late for me to start in being a Robinson Crusoe, which reminds me that when I took Mrs. Beardmore to the Fulham pantomime last night it was Dick Whittington. And upon my soul, if he didn’t go to Morocco with his cat. ‘Well,’ I said to Mrs. Beardmore, ‘it’s not a bit like it.’ I told her that if Dick Whittington went there now he wouldn’t take his cat with him. He’d take a box of Keating’s. Somebody behind said, ‘Hush.’ And I said, ‘Hush yourself. Perhaps you’ve been to Morocco?’ Which made him look very silly, for I don’t suppose he’s ever been further East than Aldgate in his life. We had no more ‘hushes’ from him, I can tell you; and Mrs. Beardmore looked round at him in a very lady-like way which she’s got from being a housekeeper, and said, ‘My friend has been to Morocco.’ After that we la-la’d the chorus in peace and quiet. Good-by, duckies, and don’t gallivant about too much.”
Sylvia had brought a bagful of books about the Roman emperors, and Olive had brought a number of anthologies that made up by the taste of the binder for the lack of it in the compiler. They were mostly about love. To satisfy Sylvia’s historical passion a week was spent in Rome and another week in Naples. She told Olive of her visit to Italy with Philip over seven years ago, and, much to her annoyance, Olive poured out a good deal of emotion over that hapless marriage.
“Don’t you feel any kind of sentimental regret?” she asked while they were watching from Posilipo the vapors of Vesuvius rose-plumed in the wintry sunset. “Surely you feel softened toward it all now. Why, I think I should regret anything that had once happened in this divinely beautiful place.”
“The thing I remember most distinctly is Philip’s having read somewhere that the best way to get rid of an importunate guide was to use the local negative and throw the head back instead of shaking it. The result was that Philip used to walk about as if he were gargling. To annoy him I used to wink behind his back at the guides, and naturally with such encouragement his local negative was absolutely useless.”