"You're having a splendid time, aren't you, Queenie? You like being grown-up?"
"I adore it," said Miss Torrance, her eyes gleaming like stars.
Alex did not wonder at it.
Night after night she watched Queenie Torrance accepting as her right the homage of innumerable men, halving the favour of her dances at crowded balls where "wall-flowers" were too numerous to be rescued from oblivion by the most determined of hostesses, going down to supper on the arm of young Goldstein and lingering with him in prolonged tête-à-tête. Goldstein, at the little round table across which he leant, recklessly oblivious of comment, endeavouring, often fruitlessly, throughout a whole evening, to obtain one direct look from those widely-set, downcast eyes under their flaxen lashes.
It was not easy, Alex found, to talk to Queenie. They often met at entertainments, and once or twice in the Park, but Queenie never rode in the mornings, as Alex sometimes did, and Lady Isabel did not allow her daughter to take up the fashionable practice of bicycling in Battersea Park, at which Queenie Torrance, in the neatest and most daring of rational costumes, was reported to excel. Once Alex, as she had said before in her childish days, asked Lady Isabel:
"Mother, may I ask Queenie Torrance to tea here? We meet everywhere, and it will be so odd if I never ask her to come here. Besides, I should like to have her."
"I'm sorry, Alex, but I'd rather you contented yourself with meetin' her in society—if you do."
"Why?" said Alex unwisely, urged by some mysterious unreason to provoke the answer which she already anticipated with resentment.
"She's not the sort of girl I should care about you being friends with very much," said Lady Isabel without heat. "I hear she's already bein' talked about."
Alex knew what the words meant, uttered by her mother and her mother's circle of intimates.