Mr. Strobridge laughed delightedly.
"You should write a 'Guide to the Knowledge of Women,' Seraphim, for the enlightenment of your men friends."
His aunt smiled, showing all her strong, well-preserved white teeth.
"I would like to, but not one of them would speak to me again, they would tear my new grey toupée from my snowy locks, and denounce me as a liar, because I would tell the one thing they strongly dislike—the truth!"
"Yes, a thoroughly lovable feminine woman loathes the truth, doesn't she! I have always found my greatest success with her lay in a distortion of every fact to suit her personal view. Katherine Bush and yourself, sweet Aunt, are the only two of your sex that I have ever met whom a man need not humour, and can speak his real mind out to."
And with this he kissed her fat hand and took his way from her presence down the gallery to his room to dress for dinner.
But all the while Stirling was coaxing the real silver and auxiliary iron grey waves into a superbly simple triumph of hairdressing, her ladyship wore a slight frown of concentrated thought.
What did it mean, this desire on the part of her secretary to see the House of Lords?
"Vermondsay—Hankhurst—Upper Harringway." She counted over a long list of the names of peers who frequented Blissington and Berkeley Square—but at the end she shook her head. "No—none of these—Who then—and what for?"
Katherine Bush was no guinea pig answering to type. What type was she, by the way? A complicated, conglomerated mixture, not easy to dissect at any time, was this new move a manifestation of sex—or type?