She was a great success, socially. She entered the smart world, it is true, under his auspices, and because he was sulky if she was not asked to the same houses, and because it was important to a good many people that Bryan Lumsden, to say nothing of Calvert & Co., should be kept in good humor. But, once in, her own talents were quite competent to keep her in the place he had made for her. She had even reached a point now where her successes were her own, and no longer were held to throw reflected lustre upon her sponsor. She fitted quickly and easily into what, after all, was her own class. In a year she rode hard and straight and had developed a heady but hitherto successful system of tactics at bridge. Bryan no longer got the credit of her clothes, but it was generally understood she was frightfully in debt and would marry him when her creditors delivered their ultimatum. She had an infantile wit and a faculty for what the French term choses inouïes. One of her riddles became proverbial.
"What did the fishes say to Noah when he asked them into the ark?" "No tanks."
I subjoin a few more specimens, not with any hope that their charm will subsist in print, but just to show with what things, on pretty lips, the weary old world is prepared to be amused.
Once she was trying to collect money for some charity and no one had change. This happens sometimes even in smart society. "Oh, dear," sighed Fenella, "everybody has the hand-to-mouth disease."
She was slightly angered at a restraining clause in one of her contracts, discovered when too late.
"You're a bad man," she told the flustered manager, "and you deserve to come to a nasty sticky end."
To Rock, of ill odor in the Park, after his senile advances had been rebuffed by a snobby little Pekinese: "Don't whine, dee-ar! I don't believe that kind of dog knows whether it's a dog or a poll-parrot or an insect."
"Bryan's caught cold, I think," she said one morning. "He keeps calling for 'Letitia'."
If these are fair samples of the parts she put at the disposal of her new friends, her reputation is not the surprise it might be to a man who knows that the dear lady to this day conducts her conversation upon an economical little vocabulary of about three hundred words.
Maybe the conscience we have spoken of had been pricking her, for when Lumsden raised his head from his reverie the world had gone red, and he was looking at the sun through her parasol.