"Yes, certainly," said Alexandra. It struck her that he seemed to be aware of the late hours she kept. It argued intimacy. "What name shall I say?"
"Oh—Chalfont."
She went upstairs again, knocked at the door, and found Mrs. Lambert with the morning's papers on the bed. She was reading of her husband's projected departure for America with his successful repertoire. There were tears in her eyes.
"I shall have to take to glasses," she said, looking up. "I can't read without weeping. What is it?"
"Mr. Chalfont is downstairs. He wants to know if you will lunch with him."
"Please tell Lord Chalfont," said Mrs. Lambert in a low voice, "that it's the anniversary of my separation from my husband, and that I'm lunching on my heart. But he can come to dinner to-night if he likes. Ask him to put you in a taxi."
She returned to the newspapers.
XV
"Lexie's coming to lunch to-morrow," Maggy informed Woolf. "We must give her a good one, Fred, and you'll behave, won't you, D.D.?"
"D.D." in Maggy's language of love stood for Dearest Darling. She was not free from the modern, time-saving habit, set by trade advertisements and the halfpenny papers, of abbreviating words in common use down to their lowest denomination.