“Who to?”
“The eldest Swaine boy—you remember Stanley Swaine? Nobody’s a bit pleased about it, because they can’t ever get married, possibly.”
“No money?”
“Not a penny, and he’s a perfect fool, except at games. He got the sack from the Bank, and now he hasn’t any job at all. Bob says he drinks, but I daresay that’s a lie.”
“And does Beatrice like him?” said Lydia, rather astonished.
“Perfectly dotty about him. He’s always hanging round—I think the pater ought to forbid him the house. But instead of that he comes in after supper of an evening, and he and Bee sit in the dining-room in the dark, and she comes up after he’s cleared off with her face like fire and her hair half down her back. Absolutely disgusting, I call it.”
Lydia was very much inclined inwardly to endorse this trenchant criticism.
She had never been so much aware of her own fastidiousness as she was now, on her return from the new surroundings which seemed to her so infinitely superior to the old. Really, it was terrible to think of how clever, fashionably-dressed Miss Forster, or haughty and disagreeable Miss Lillicrap, would have looked upon Olive Senthoven and her slangy, vulgar confidences.
As for the young ladies at Elena’s, they would probably have refused to believe that anything so unrefined could be related to Lydia Raymond at all.
Nevertheless, Lydia Raymond expressed interest and even sympathy in all that Olive told her, and was conscious of feeling both pleased and flattered when, as they entered Regency Terrace again, Olive remarked with what, by the Senthoven standards, perilously approached to sentiment.