The two were sitting close to the door into the ballroom, and at that moment Peter passed in front of them talking to a girl. He just glanced at them, took them both in, and melted into the crowd.
“Yes; that’s Mr. Mainwaring,” said Silvia confidently. “I—I liked him. Don’t you like him?”
Nellie made a little sideways, bird-like movement of her head. Out of her changed relations with Peter she felt that something like antagonism had minutely sprouted. She wanted ... yes, she would give an answer that would seem wholly appreciative of Peter, and that would yet contain something that Silvia possibly (just possibly) would not like.
“Dear Peter!” she said. “Of course, we’re all devoted to Peter. It’s the fashion to be devoted to Peter.”
CHAPTER V
During the next month the foam and froth which spouted from the weir of London, into which Mrs. Wardour, of her own design and desire, had been so expensively plunged, began to be less tumultuous as she floated away from the occasion of her first bewildering dive. Lady Thirlmere, that admirable godmother, had chucked her into it, holding her breath and shutting her eyes, and now Mrs. Wardour was getting her head above water and beginning to paddle on her own account. The sponsor had provided the richness of total immersion, and Lucy Wardour was certainly swimming. As she came up to the surface, she found herself surrounded by iridescent bubbles; she was bobbing along in a mill-race of desirable acquaintances. She had made no friends—there was no time for leisurely processes of this sort; but when she had decided that she wanted to spend her months and her money in the pursuit of some such indefinite goal as now loomed promisingly in front of her, she had not expected to make friends. She had not “gone for” friends; she had gone for something that attracted the attention of the accomplished gentlemen who wrote those small and exquisite paragraphs in the daily papers. Inscrutably enough, that happened to be her ambition; what she wanted was to see (though she knew it already) that “Mrs. Wardour was among those who brought a party to the first night of The Bugaboo.”... “Mrs. Wardour gave a dinner at Wardour House last night, followed by a small dance.” ... “Mrs. Wardour was in the Park, chatting to her friends, and wearing a green toque and her famous pearls.”... Among her secretary’s duties was that of pasting these juicy morsels, supplied by a press-agency, into a red morocco scrapbook. In fact, she was streaking her way across the bespangled firmament of London, like a comet, with a blank face and an anxious eye. But those who thought that the anxious eye received no impressions just because they were not instantly recorded on the blank face, made the mistake of this season.
May Trentham had undeniably been guilty of this error. From that first night, when she had brought her young men to the opera, she had thought that Mrs. Wardour was not sufficiently alive to her value, and as Mrs. Wardour did not appear to be learning any better, she had certainly permitted herself to indulge in little rudenesses, little patronizations, little contempts, which Mrs. Wardour did not appear to notice. Certainly she made no direct allusion to them, and her rather meaningless countenance showed no sign of having perceived them....
This afternoon she was occupied with her secretary in making out a list of a favoured few, not more than eighty all told, who were to be bidden to an entertainment at which the Russian ballet was to figure. She ran her short, blunt forefinger down the alphabetical pages of her “visiting-list,” and dictated names to the gaunt Miss Winterton, who took them down in an angry scribble of shorthand. The last few pages were approaching.
“Then there’s Mrs. Trentham,” she said to Silvia. “I think we’ll leave out Mrs. Trentham.”