He seemed to ponder this, his clever young face puckered with an exaggeration of gravity. He gave it up with a puzzled laugh.
“’Pon my word, I don’t know! That’s what I’m going for.”
“To find out—?”
“Oh, whether she is perfectly charming, or—just the other thing.”
It struck her that his manner was more offhand than the occasion required—that the alternative he had just so gaily admitted troubled him more than he wished her to know.
But Florence Essington knew, in spite of him, more than she looked, and much more than she said. She felt that she at least foresaw so much that to spare herself the train of thought she answered him in quite another vein.
“You know, Tony,” she said, with that little, settling movement women use to begin a gossip, “what really amuses me is that we haven’t—at least I haven’t—the slightest idea, not a glimmer, what people Mrs. Budd will be asking down. She hardly knows me, hasn’t seen me since I left school for Paris—don’t you dare to mention how long ago! And yet she fairly threatened me into it, eyes popping and every hair a-quiver. I quite got the feeling that she wants something of me.”
“Of course,” he grinned cheerfully, “they always do.”
“But something special.”
“Letters of introduction?” he hazarded. “It’s quite on the cards. They’ll be going to London next season, if she doesn’t—but, of course, you know what she’s after.”