“After all, he can afford to be generous,” Elsie thought complacently. “An old man like him! I expect I’m a fool to look at him, really.”
She meant that her attraction for men was sufficiently potent to ensure her ability to cast her spell wherever she chose, but common sense reminded her that the number of men within her immediate sphere was limited. Even men who followed her, or addressed her casually in the street, were mostly of the bank-clerk type, and of her own actual acquaintance scarcely one reached the level of the professional class to which Williams belonged.
At Hillbourne Terrace, Elsie found the front door locked, and realised that it must be late. She understood what had happened. Mrs. Palmer, angry at her daughter’s tardiness, had probably decided to give her a fright, and was waiting in her dressing-gown, angry and tired, for Elsie to try the side door.
“I just won’t, then,” muttered Elsie angrily. “I’ll jolly well go to Ireen.”
She had seen a light in the house opposite as she came up the street, and it would not be the first time that she had called on Irene Tidmarsh for hospitality.
Her friend opened the door in person, and Elsie explained her position, giving, however, no specific reason for her lateness.
“Come in,” said Irene indifferently. “You can sleep with me if you want to. I often thank God I’ve no mother.”
The two girls went up to Irene’s large, untidy bedroom in the front of the house, and began to undress, and Elsie was unable to resist the topic of the pink silk underclothes that obsessed her imagination.
“Geraldine says only tarts wear them.”
“What does she know about it?” Irene enquired. “Ladies of title wear them—that Lady Dorothy Anvers, that’s always being photographed, she goes in for black silk nightgowns—black, if you please!”