“If you can say so conscientiously she’ll be delighted to hear it.” And she gathered up her cloak and gloves.
Meeting Rupert Waterville the next day, as he often did, at the Saint George’s Club, which offers a much-appreciated hospitality to secretaries of legation and to the natives of the countries they assist in representing, Littlemore let him know that his prophecy had been fulfilled and that Lady Demesne had been making proposals for an interview. “My sister read me a desperate letter from her.”
Our young man was all critical attention again. “‘Desperate’?”
“The letter of a woman so scared that she’ll do anything. I may be a great brute, but her scare amuses me.”
“You’re in the position of Olivier de Jalin in Le Demi-Monde,” Waterville remarked.
“In Le Demi-Monde?” Littlemore was not quick at catching literary allusions.
“Don’t you remember the play we saw in Paris? Or like Don Fabrice in L’Aventurière. A bad woman tries to marry an honourable man, who doesn’t know how bad she is, and they who do know step in and push her back.”
“Yes, it comes to me. There was a good deal of lying,” Littlemore recalled, “all round.”
“They prevented the marriage, however—which is the great thing.”
“The great thing if your heart’s set! One of the active parties was the intimate friend of the man in love, the other was his son. Demesne’s nothing at all to me.”