"Oh please don't trouble," said Miss Wangle icily. "I remember the dear bishop once saying——"
"And I suppose after dinner you'll go to a theatre," interrupted Mrs. Mosscrop-Smythe, for the first time in the memory of the oldest guest indifferent to the bishop and what he had said, thought, or done.
"Oh, no, it's war time," said Patricia, "we shall just dine quietly at the Quadrant Grill-room."
A meaning glance passed between Mrs. Mosscrop-Smythe and Miss Wangle. Why she had fixed upon the Quadrant Grill-room Patricia could not have said.
"And now," said Patricia, "I must run upstairs and see that my best bib and tucker are in proper condition to be worn before my fiancé. I'll tell him what you say about the ring. Good night, everybody, if we don't meet again."
"Patricia Brent," admonished Patricia to her reflection in the looking-glass, as she brushed her hair that night, "you're a most unmitigated little liar. You've told those people the wickedest of wicked lies. You've engaged yourself to an unknown major in the British Army. You're going to dine with him to-morrow night, and heaven knows what will be the result of it all. A single lie leads to so many. Oh, Patricia, Patricia!" she nodded her head admonishingly at the reflection in the glass. "You're really a very wicked young woman." Then she burst out laughing. "At least, I have given them something to talk about, any old how. By now they've probably come to the conclusion that I'm a most awful rip."
Patricia never confessed it to herself, but she was extremely lonely. Instinctively shy of strangers, she endeavoured to cover up her self-consciousness by assuming an attitude of nonchalance, and the result was that people saw only the artificiality. She had been brought up in the school of "men are beasts," and she took no trouble to disguise her indifference to them. With women she was more popular. If anyone were ill at Galvin House, it was always Patricia Brent who ministered to them, sat and read to them, and cheered them through convalescence back to health.
Her acquaintance with men had been almost entirely limited to those she had found in the various boarding-houses, glorified in the name of residential hotels, at which she had stayed. Five years previously, on the death of her father, a lawyer in a small country town, she had come to London and obtained a post as secretary to a blossoming politician. There she had made herself invaluable, and there she had stayed, performing the same tasks day after day, seldom going out, since the war never at all, and living a life calculated to make an acid spinster of a Venus or a Juno.
"Oh, bother to-morrow!" said Patricia as she got into bed that night; "it's a long way off and perhaps something will happen before then," and with that she switched off the light.