She often saw Queenie Goldstein, as much surrounded as in the days before her marriage, and her excessive décolletage now enhanced by the jewels showered upon her by her husband.
Queenie once invited her to a dinner-party at her little house in Curzon Street, but Alex knew that she would not be allowed to go, and showed the invitation with great trepidation to her mother.
"Very impertinent of her! Why, she's never been introduced to me. I shouldn't dream of allowin' any daughter of mine to go and dine with people whom I didn't know personally, even if they were absolutely all right."
Lady Isabel, so easy-going and tepidly affectionate towards her children, was adamant where her social creed was concerned.
"In any case, Alex, I've told you before that I don't want you to go on with the acquaintance. That Goldstein woman is gettin' herself talked about, unless I'm very much mistaken."
Again that mysterious accusation! Alex said no more, but wondered naïvely how the phase that had been used in connection with Queenie Torrance could still be applicable to Maurice Goldstein's wife.
Surely married women did not flirt? The term, to Alex, symbolized she knew not what of offensive coquetry, and of general "bad form."
This belief had been inculcated into her as a precept but, nevertheless, she could not divest herself of a secret suspicion that, although Lady Isabel might have rebuked, she would not have been altogether averse from a lapse or two in that direction on the part of her daughter.
But Alex embarked upon no flirtation. The men who danced with her or took her in to dinner never seemed desirous of talking personalities. They made perfunctory remarks about the decorations of the tables, the quality of the floor and the music, and the revival of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
The sense that the intercourse between them must be sustained by conversation never left her for an instant.