3
The "lunch," laid--Aliette noticed--for five, consisted of grilled soles, turkey with cranberry sauce, plum-pudding with cream and brandy, mince-pies, and the whole old-fashioned indigestible paraphernalia. Holly decked the Venetian wall-lights; mistletoe hung from the chandelier. But there were ghosts at the feast. Try as they three might to be cheerful, each felt conscious of awkwardness.
After the servants had left the room, Julia, breaking the rules of her "medicine-man," took a glass of brandy and a cigarette.
"You haven't even looked at my Christmas present," she said to Aliette; and she would have liked to add, if the words had not seemed so ill-omened, "I sha'n't give you one at all next year, if you don't take more interest in it."
Aliette reached for her hand-bag (which she had hung, a habit of hers, on the back of her chair) and took out the envelope Julia had given her before luncheon. Throughout the meal she had been dreading this moment, because, obviously, the envelope contained a check--and she hated the idea of accepting a check from Ronnie's mother. Slitting the flap with her fruit-knife, picking out the stamped paper, she saw at a glance that the check was for five hundred pounds. Her heart leaped. Five hundred pounds meant freedom from Powolney Mansions, the possibility of taking some little abode where she and Ronnie could be happy. Then reluctance overwhelmed her.
"It's too good of you," she protested. "But I can't, really I can't take all this money."
"Rubbish!" snapped Julia in her bruskest manner. "Why shouldn't you take money from me? All my money really belongs to Ronnie. If his father had had any sense he'd have left it to him. Besides, you need it. You can't go on staying at that appalling boarding-house for ever."
"But we can't take it! Can we, man?" Aliette's eyes appealed to Ronnie; who said, trying to be gay: "You mustn't rob yourself for us, mater."
"I'm not robbing myself. Sir Peter sold three of the Little Overdine properties a fortnight ago."
"Did he, though? Whom to?"