“And she wasn’t allowed to play with the tortoise for fear it should get ferocious and spring at her! Yes, I remember. She’s evidently sufficiently grown-up for the ball-room now.”
“Merle des Essarts must be about twenty,” remarked Mrs. Heron, helping herself to olives; “she has been abroad a great deal, I believe. If she is half as lovely as she promised to be, she ought to make a brilliant match.”
Stuart smiled.
“What do you think of our wizard in diamonds, Arthur?”
CHAPTER II
A CHOICE OF HEROES
The same evening, two girls were huddled in a doorway of His Majesty’s Theatre. They had drifted with the crowd down the stone steps leading from the Upper Circle, their brains struggling to return to reality from the world-that-is-not. Then a voice pierced bewilderment with the exclamation: “Why, it’s raining!” and they emerged on to an unfamiliar back street, pavements dark mirrors of glistening wet, something sinister about the hovering gnome-like figures who sprang alive at their elbows, offering in hoarse voices to fetch a vehicle. And then umbrellas began to slide up before their owners had even quitted the shelter of the outjutting porch; umbrellas with nasty vindictive spikes. Other people rolled away in landaulettes and taxi-cabs. It was essentially one of those occasions which cry out for the luxury of male protection; for the authoritative voice to say: “stay where you are for the moment, while I look for the car.” Then the beckoning summons, the dash to the kerbstone, an address given, a door slammed, the swift easy glide up the street: “Now we’re all right,” remarks the protective male, as he adjusts rug and window; “beastly night....”
Which is why Peter remarked suddenly, as they waited for one of the shadow-shapes to be faithful to the trust reposed in him: “We shall have to admit a man, Merle, because of the taxis. It’s all right to be a shivering outcast when you get home and think about it. It’s the present part of the business I object to. What on earth possessed your grandmother to want the use of her own carriage to-night?”
“It’s the birthday of an Ambassador,” Merle explained apologetically; “and she so hates going in four-wheelers.”
The crowd was thinning. Presently they would be the only two remaining in the doorway.