Montagu hung up the receiver, and swore. He was quite panic-stricken by this time. So Adolphus Prince rang her up at ten o'clock in the morning, did he? He would show the old dotard who was the better man!
Five minutes later he had secured his call, and was inviting Miss Leslie to lunch with him at the Ritz.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE SECOND BEST
"Where shall we go to-night?" enquired the insatiable Dumps.
"Bed," replied her exhausted papa, before any one else could speak.
The Joy-Week was nearly over. For five days and nights the newly emancipated Miss Sylvia Mablethorpe had been allowed a free hand. Each morning she had conducted her mother relentlessly to shops. Once or twice her devoted father had accompanied the expedition, but after being twice warned by an officious young policeman for loitering outside a modiste's in Dover Street, had excused himself from further attendance.
"They are a most amazing sex," he observed to Philip. "My precious pair actually spent an hour and a quarter in a hosiery establishment in Knightsbridge yesterday morning (into which my modesty prevented me from accompanying them), and when they came out neither of them could say for certain if she had bought anything or not. I wonder how they do it: if a mere man were to spend an hour and a quarter in a shop, he would by the end of that time either be lying dead on the floor or else equipped with several thousand pairs of everything. No! Henceforth they shop alone! I decline to run any further risk of contracting flat-foot through standing about on a hard pavement, or mental prostration from thinking out topics of conversation suitable to retired heroes who open carriage doors. To-morrow morning, Philip, I will give them one shilling each—they don't really need so much, for it costs nothing to have things dragged off high shelves and put back again; but they will probably require ices or some other poison about eleven—and you and I will get up an appetite for lunch by going for a ride."
At the present moment the party were taking tea at the Carlton, after a matinée.