It was then, after their eyes had encountered for a long minute, that Etta Hudson had said that Robert Grimshaw wasn’t looking very chirpy. Except for the moments when their eyes did meet—the moments when each wondered what the deuce the other was up to—Etta Hudson flung out her words with an admirable naturalness:
“Oh, take a pill, and don’t talk about the passing years,” she said. “It’s the spring that’s crocking you up. Horses are just like that. Why, even Orlando here stumbles at the fall of the leaf and about Chestnut Sunday. Yes, you take me down to Bushey. You know you’ll find me as good as a tonic. I should say you’re having an overdose of too-brainy society. Doesn’t Dudley’s wife go in for charity organization or politics? She’s a sort of a little wax saint, isn’t she, got up to look like a Gaiety girl? I know the sort. Yes, you tell me about Dudley Leicester’s wife. I’d like to know. That’s a bargain. You take me down to Bushey and talk about Dudley Leicester’s wife all the way down, and then you can talk about me all the way up, and we’re quits.”
Robert Grimshaw raised his eyes till, dark and horseshoe-like, they indicated, as it were, a threat—as it were, a challenge.
“If you put it up to me to that extent,” he said, “I’ll bet you a new riding-habit that you look as if you could do with, that you won’t come down and lunch in Bushey to-day.”
“What’s the matter with my habit?” she said. “I’ve had it six years. If it’s been good enough for all that time, it’s good enough for now. Give me time to say a word to old Lady Collimore. My husband wants me to keep in with her, and she’s got a new astrologer living with her as a P. G. I won’t be five minutes after I’ve spoken to her, and then I’m your man.”
“You’ll come in these things?” Grimshaw said.
“Oh, that’s all right,” she answered. “It’s just popping into a taxi-cab and getting out at the Park gates and walking across the Park, and having lunch at one of those little ‘pub’ places, and then I suppose you’ll let the taxi drop me at the door. You won’t turn me adrift at the Marble Arch, or send me home by tram?”
“Well, you are like a man,” Robert Grimshaw said. “You look like a man, and you talk like a man....”
She tapped her horse with her crop.
“Oh, I’m all right,” she said. “But I wish—I wish to hell I had been one,” she called over her shoulder, whilst slowly she walked her horse along by the railings, searching with her eyes for the venerable figure and tousled grey hair emerging centaur-like from its bath-chair—the figure of the noted Lady Collimore, who had mysterious gifts, who had been known to make top-hats perform the feat of levitation, and whose barrack-like house at Queen’s Gate had an air of being filled with astrologers, palmists, and faith-healers.