Deb wailed: “I didn’t know that it meant a prima-donna’s powerful mezzo-soprano in a bed-sittingroom already containing two suites of Louis Quinze furniture, and forty-two cases of fur cloaks, and a permanent dog with permanent asthma, and an anthracite stove fire, and a grand piano, and complicated domestic arrangements for producing food at a moment’s notice, and a clothes-line, and litter from their last year’s variety entertainment, and My Child My Solace complete with curls——”
Jenny stopped laughing as the last item was catalogued. “Dolph’s potty about her....”
“About Manon....” Deb nodded gravely. She and everybody else had noticed what was so blatantly happening. She cuddled on the floor beside Jenny’s knees, and leant her cheek against the other’s dangling hand; then she slid her lips along the smooth warm arm the whole way up to the elbow.... One comforted Jenny by Jenny’s own methods.
For the coming of La llorraine and her daughter to the second floor of Montagu Hall Hotel had made a difference to the Chorus. It was not so tight-fitting. A rival cluster of intimacy had been established by the newcomers, Stella Marcus, and Dolph Carew; and Jenny was perforce drawn into it from time to time ... Dolph was insistent that she should be kind to Manon, aged sixteen. And La llorraine, with her overpowering conviviality, had sought to make an undivided bohemian settlement out of the bedroom inhabitants of the second floor; all doors open at all times, and a general pooling of minor difficulties.... “Now Stella, my dee-urr, will you be kind and count me that washing while Manon play with Bobby Carew and I buy a von-derful cream cheese for the Countess who dejeuners with me in my room to-day. Then need I say, my dee-urr, that I expect you to com’ in and share.” And Stella, who took delight in La llorraine, replied: “Chère Madame, you are as generous with your Countess as with your cheese.”
La llorraine stood for the Continent, as the Continent ached in the memory of those who had loved it before 1914. Not for any one country or another, but for all the gay cities: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, St Petersburg ... irrespective of the distinctions of war. Actually, she was born in some small town on the divisions of Russia and Poland. Her present appellation, which covered stage and private use, could, in its initial eccentricity only be explained by the admiration awakened in her on first encounter with ffoulkes, ffolliott, and ffrench.... “My dee-urr, but what an advertisement! Bah—I know how to catch that public by the ear. They are swine, I tell you ... but this will br-r-ring them in millions. You will see!” So she became La llorraine. And as La llorraine, she stood for every aspect of continental life; garret, and hotel and court; grande dame, and then third-rate mummer; the popular artiste, or the good thrifty woman who can cook succulent dishes for her household. Physically, she was built on a magnificent scale, and always wore plain and expensive black—save for breakfast, when she horrified the boarding-house by appearing in a soiled dressing-gown, red-and-gold Turkish slippers, and a knitted blue woollen shawl over the short dyed yellow hair which formed such a crazy mop to her clear-cut aristocratic face, long and pale, with kind eyes and delicate, sneering mouth. There was no adventure of the demi-monde too lurid for imagination to cast her as heroine; and against that she could whisper mysterious tales of court intrigue, and call Grand-Dukes by their pet names, with an air that betrayed her a careless participant of their intimate revels.
Fiercely she adored Manon, whose hair hung in streaked yellow curls over her shoulders, and from whose red, greedy little wolf’s mouth one could envisage the dart of a red pointed little tongue. Manon fulfilled all expectations as the foreign ingénue: soft, lisping voice, demure eyelids. In a frequent spasm of recollection, La llorraine would dismiss her from the room when the conversation was too adult for due preservation of a maiden’s bloom; but on those occasions that her mother forgot to dismiss her, no doubt Manon picked up much valuable information.... Certainly, whether from innocence or art, she managed Dolph Carew exquisitely, never seeming aware of an infatuation so blatant that it shrieked itself aloud at every moment; yielding not a dewdrop of her freshness to his importunity; and at the same time contriving to keep him attached and useful. “My dee-urr,” La llorraine declaimed to Stella Marcus, “such a clown for my Manon?—not for anything in that world. I have ... plans for her!” ... a queer impression stealing on the heels of her remark, that Manon was designed to be mistress of a third-rate illegitimate royalty of a fourth-rate kingdom.... A faded Louis drawing-room in vieux-rose—an old roué bowing his entrance ... waxed moustache and imperial ... careful buttonhole.... “I have sent for my little daughter!” regally from La llorraine.
Grumbling prophecies were afloat in Montagu Hall, that some catastrophe was bound soon to happen among that second-floor crowd—the Carews, the Marcuses, Burton Ames, and—with vindictive inflexion—those disreputable mummers! It was really getting insupportable; and fancy Mrs Carew taking no steps about her husband’s ridiculous behaviour with that nasty little thing in ringlets, but to be instead forever running after Major Ames, who isn’t my idea of an officer—not at all well-set-up—and the noise—and in and out of the bedrooms—how Mr Marcus can allow his daughter ... but it isn’t as if they were English, no, nor Dutch either, although they never said they were. Did you know that they dressed up on Christmas Eve, all the lot of them, and had a procession up and down the stairs, and the—girl—wore—tights?——
Thus Deb mimicked with diabolical accuracy, the existing Drawing-room Opinion.
“And very attractive you looked in ’em, darling!”