“Indifferently well,” Francis replied. “I knew her when she was a child, and we seem to come together every now and then at long intervals. As a debutante she was charming. Lately it seems to me that she has got into the wrong set.”
“What do you call the wrong set?”
He hesitated for a moment.
“Please don't think that I am laying down the law,” he said. “I have been out so little, the last few years, that I ought not, perhaps, to criticise. Lady Cynthia, however, seems to me to belong to the extreme section of the younger generation, the section who have a sort of craze for the unusual, whose taste in art and living is distorted and bizarre. You know what I mean, don't you—black drawing-rooms, futurist wall-papers, opium dens and a cocaine box! It's to some extent affectation, of course, but it's a folly that claims its victims.”
She studied him for a moment attentively. His leanness was the leanness of muscular strength and condition, his face was full of vigour and determination.
“You at least have escaped the abnormal,” she remarked. “I am not quite sure how the entertainments at The Walled House would appeal to you, but if my father should invite you there, I should advise you not to go.”
“Why not?” he asked.
She hesitated for a moment.
“I really don't know why I should trouble to give you advice,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I don't care whether you go or not. In any case, you are scarcely likely to be asked.”
“I am not sure that I agree with you,” he protested. “Your father seems to have taken quite a fancy to me.”