“Black waistcoat where other people elect to wear white, and a tendency to serious intentions. Logan Thane owns a country-seat with grapes and antlers, and will, if properly trained, stand up by a mantelpiece and slash with his riding-whip. Bertie Milligan, youthful and intense, now in the clutches of a designing female; the Oxford voice—and can use it to imitate ducklings. Grey Rubinstein, fat, and the son of a judge—but with possibilities of humour. Armand Drelincourt has just bought another motor-car. Always. And will tell you about his fatal temperament. Roy Clarke, a due sense of his own importance, and could be brought to develop a sense of ours; one-steps like seven devils. Mark St. Quentin——” Merle broke off the catalogue with a laugh; “you know Mark; he was the means of bringing us together; I don’t think we’ll place another responsibility upon his soul. José di Gasparis vibrates like a cinema when he dances; and the blacking of his shoes will come off on your satin ones. Won’t that do? I can’t think of any more.”
Peter had been scribbling furiously. She glanced with critical eye down the list.
“I’ll bring this with me on the 18th, though I can’t say the material is promising. I like Logan Thane best.” She mused awhile over the names. “Yes, Merle, I think it will be Logan Thane.”
But Merle’s straight black lashes already shadowed her cheeks. She was, if anything, lovelier asleep than awake. Peter glanced at her with a certain whimsical tenderness—then crept in beside her, and switched off the crimson light.
“We do need the taxi-man,” was her last coherent thought; “she more than I. She’s more feminine. Or at least, she’s somehow allowed to show more feminine.”
Pepita Kyndersley lived with an aunt at Thatch Lane, some half an hour’s distance by rail from London. Her mother was dead. Her father, responsible for her name, a tenor ballad-singer; sometimes in evening-dress, at a private entertainment; oftener in a red hunting-coat with gilt buttons, at a pier concert. At all times, a disreputable but attractive personage, never to be mentioned by Peter’s aunt; treated by Peter herself, when she chanced to meet him twice or thrice in the year, with good-humoured and tolerant amusement, as from one man to another. Nor would she have found objection in attaching herself permanently to the “Idol of all the Capitals of Europe,” as the leaflets were wont to declare him after a tour of the watering-places between Margate and Beachy Head; such an erratic existence was not without its charms; but the Idol shook his head at her suggestion:
“I would not have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita,” tenderly.
Peter laughed: “The ladies who find your voice so full of tears and your hair so full of wave, would lose some of their enthusiasm if they saw you forever accompanied by a grown-up daughter. Is that it?”
Bertram Kyndersley deprecated; met the said daughter’s eye—and slowly winked his own; an inexcusable loss of moral equilibrium, atoned for by the rich sobriety of his next remark:
“You are a great comfort to me, my little girl. Your poor mother said you would be a comfort to me,” for by this manner of speech did he seek reminder of his surprising parenthood, a factor he was otherwise liable to forget, but to which he fondly clung for the sake of its unanswerable link with respectability. Then he borrowed her quarterly dress allowance, and went with it a-wooing.