"She gets there," he boomed. "Goo' gir'! Goo' gir'!"
V
Dorothy indulged her own renewed joie de vivre by investigating the glimpse of her father's private joie de vivre vouchsafed to her that night in St. John's Wood, and without much difficulty she found out that for the last two years he had been maintaining there a second establishment, which at the very lowest calculation must be costing him £400 a year. It was not remarkable that he had wanted to obtain a higher rate of interest on his wife's capital. His daughter debated with herself how to play this unusual hand, and she decided not to lead these black trumps too soon, but to reserve them for the time when they might threaten her ace of hearts and that long suit of diamonds. At present she was not suffering the least inconvenience from her family, and since she went to live in Halfmoon Street it had not been her habit to visit Lonsdale Road more often than once a month. These visits, rare as winter sunshine in England, were not much warmer: the family basked for a while in the radiance of Dorothy's rich clothes, but they soon found that clothes only give heat to the person who wears them, and since Dorothy did not encourage them to follow the sun like visitors to the azure coast, they made the best of their own fireside and avoided any risk of taking cold by depending too much on her deceptive radiance.
Meanwhile, Hausberg had turned Dorothy's £250 into £500 by nothing more compromising than good advice; and by March, to celebrate her twenty-first birthday, the £500 had become £2,000. Not even then did Hausberg ask anything from her in return; occasionally a dim suspicion crossed her mind that a profound cause must lie underneath this display of good will, and she asked herself if he was patiently, very patiently, angling for her; but when time went by without his striking, the suspicions died away and did not recur. Moreover, her financial adviser was engaged in dazzling Queenie Molyneux with diamonds, to the manifest chagrin of Lonsdale, who had let the liaison between himself and Queenie come to mean much more to him than he had ever intended that evening at the Savoy. In the end his mistress was so much dazzled by the diamonds that she put on rose-colored spectacles to save her eyes and, looking through them at Hausberg, decided to accept his devotion. Lonsdale took the theft of his love hardly; whatever chance he might have had of entering the Foreign Office disappeared under an emotional strain that in so round and pink a young man was nearly grotesque. This seemed to Dorothy a suitable moment to repay evil with good, and when, shortly afterward, she saw the disconsolate lover gloomily contemplating a half-bottle of Pol Roger '98 on a solitary table at the Savoy she went over to him and offered to be reconciled.
He squeezed Dorothy's hand gratefully, sighed, and shook his head.
"I can't keep away from the old place. Every night we used to come here and—" The recollection was too much for him; he could do nothing but point mutely to the half-bottle.
"That makes you think," he said, at last. "After the dozens of bottles we've had together, to come down to that beastly little dwarf alone."
"And you've failed in your examination, too?" inquired Dorothy, tenderly rubbing it in.
"Just as well, Doodles, just as well. I should be afraid to attach myself even to an embassy at present."
The band struck up the music of the Pink Quartet.