Silvia supplied this information, and Miss Winterton gathered up her papers and left them. She had the air of some dethroned queen, for whom disastrous circumstances had made it necessary to perform menial offices. Mrs. Wardour breathed a sigh of obvious relief when she had gone.
“She terrifies me, Silvia,” she said, when the door had closed. “She and that new butler. To think that one of them is called Summerton and the other Winterton. Well, I’m sure!”
Silvia blew out a little bubble of laughter.
“Stand up to them, dear,” she said.
“Yes, it’s all very well to talk; but how am I to stand up to them when my knees tremble? I wouldn’t have it known, but that’s the fact. Well, we are going to have a grand party next week.”
Mrs. Wardour relaxed herself in the wicker chair.
“It’s been a job and a half,” she said, “and I wish your father was alive to see what a good job and a half I’ve made of it. He always had a hankering for high life himself, but he was too busy to catch hold of it. ‘When I give the word, Lucy,’ he’s often said to me, ‘we’ll start in and show them all how to do it.’ Often he’s said that to me. And I always had a taste for it, too; and sure enough it came natural to me from the first. We’re pretty well sitting down and knowing everybody now.”
Hard work it certainly had been; for the last two months Mrs. Wardour had worked as hard at securing the goal she had so steadfastly set before her as her husband had ever done in providing the paraphernalia for the enterprise; but now she might fairly claim that she was beginning to sit and know everybody. She had brought to her task an unremitting industry, and—when the tide was once flowing in her favour, so that it was possible to consider not so much whom she would ask but whom she would leave out—a steely ruthlessness. That ruthlessness, indeed, had been a weapon throughout the campaign; if a desirable guest was unable to come on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, Mrs. Wardour had adamantinely proceeded with Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; she had even taken her place at the telephone and demanded in her flat, firm voice that her quarry should consult his engagement-book and let her know which was the first disengaged night. Ruthless, also, she had now become, as in the case of Mrs. Trentham, when the question was one of exclusion, and the party for the Russian ballet had been selected on the sternest principles. Thinking over that now, her mind reverted to Silvia’s final invitation.
“And who is your Mr. Mainwaring?” she asked.
Silvia again had to stifle some embarrassment that, since it did not exist on the surface at all, must have had some more secret origin.