"For Dolly's out and about again,
She doesn't give a damn for a shower of rain.
Here's Dolly with her collie!
And London, dear old London,
London is itself again."
This outburst was followed by a silence which was presently broken by a sound of torn paper.
"What are you tearing up, Tony?"
"Oh, nothing," he called back, in accents of elaborate indifference. "Only an old program."
In the morning Dorothy looked in the paper-basket, the bottom of which was lightly powdered by the fragments of a letter. She stooped to pick up the pieces; then she stopped.
"What does it matter who it was for? It was never sent. But I was only just in time."
On October 15th a party of eight visited "The Belle of Belgravia" at the Vanity. Besides Tony and Dorothy, there were Arthur Lonsdale, who had long forgotten all about Queenie Molyneux and could now watch a musical comedy as coldly as a dramatic critic whose paper did not depend on the theatrical advertisements. He brought his partner, Adrian Lee, whose pretty little wife, all cheeks and hair, looked much more like an actress than Dorothy, though she was really the daughter of a bishop. People used to wonder how a bishop came to have such a daughter; they forgot that while he was a vicar he had written a commentary on the Song of Solomon, with foot-notes as luscious as the plums that sink to the bottom of a cake. Harry Tufton came, and a Mrs. Foster-ffrench who went everywhere except where she most wanted to go and was always a little resentful that even with her two "f's" she could not hook herself up to some altitudes. However, that was Mrs. Foster-ffrench's private sorrow, and she did not let it mar a jolly evening. The other guests were Capt. Archibald Keith, late of the 16th Hussars, who had abandoned the cavalry in order to write the librettos of musical comedies, and a Mrs. Mainwaring, who kept a fashionable hat-shop in Bruton Street and was the widow of poor Dick Mainwaring, a brother of Lord Hughenden. Everybody always spoke about him as poor Dick Mainwaring, but whether because he had been killed at Paardeburg or because he had married Rita Daubeny was uncertain; it probably varied with the point of view of the speaker. The friends of Mrs. Mainwaring put down any oddness in her behavior to French creole blood and a childhood in Martinique; to the former was also attributable her chic in hats; to the latter the dryness and pallor of her complexion; French blood or French brandy, Martinique or Martell, the Hon. Mrs. Richard Mainwaring certainly did stimulate conversation just as paprika stimulates the appetite. But however jocund her life, her hats were chaste, and however sharp her play, her name was honorable. Moreover, so many people owed her money that they had to be pleasant to her. Mrs. Foster-ffrench, in spite of her name, had no French blood to excuse her odd behavior; in fact, she had nothing except a hyphen and those two "f's." Mr. Foster-ffrench was a younger son who, having failed to grow sisal profitably in the Bahamas, was now experimenting in Mozambique with the jikungo or Inhambane nut, and liable at any moment to experiment with vanila in Tahiti or pearls on the Great Barrier Reef; the only experiment he was never likely to make was going back to Mrs. Foster-ffrench. Dorothy wondered what Tony found to attract him in such a gathering; yet he was in tremendous spirits, obviously delighted that Archie Keith should have met the Vanity comedian that afternoon and warned him who would be in front. He was proud that all the girls on the stage kept their eyes on Dorothy throughout the evening, proud that the comedian inserted two special gags for the benefit of the jolly party, which were rewarded by a loud burst of laughter; and when the alarmed audience trained their opera-glasses upon the boxes as a beleagured garrison might train their guns upon the wild yell of savages he was radiant. After the performance they sat round a large circular table in the Savoy, and when the orchestra played "Dolly and her Collie" there was so much applause from the tables all round that Dorothy could not help feeling rather proud of the pleasure her return to town had given and was touched to think that her memory was still green. The evening wound up at the Lees' flat in Berkeley Street, when Adrian Lee and Clarehaven hospitably lost a good deal of money to their guests in the course of three hours' baccarat.
Now that Dorothy had broken her rule and had visited the Vanity for the first time since she had left the boards, she felt that she could not maintain her policy of isolation any longer; she told Clarehaven as much when they were strolling back down Curzon Street and breathing in the air of night after those feverish rooms.
"Doodles, my dear thing, I'm delighted! I never wanted you to give up any of your old friends. It was you who insisted on cutting them out like that."
"And if," she went on, "we can sit in a box with Rita Mainwaring, I don't think I can keep up this pretense of not being able to meet Olive."