“I’ll be with you in one minute,” repeated Mary, with burning cheeks and a beating heart. But Milly continued to stare. Suddenly she laid impulsive hands on her shoulders and gave her a kiss.
Mary didn’t like kissing. Her friend’s proneness to the habit always irritated her secretly; this present indulgence in it brought Mary as near to active dislike as it would have been possible for her to get.
Milly went back to the drawing-room seething with an excited curiosity. Before she could make up her mind to follow Mary stood a long moment in black despair; and then “biting on the bullet,” as the soldiers say, she went to join the others.
“Naughty girl!” was the arch reception of Mrs. Wren. “I’m very cross. Didn’t you promise not to be late? But if you must call before lunch on dukes in Park Lane I suppose people like us will have to take the consequences.”
Mary would gladly have given a year’s salary for the head of Mrs. Wren on a charger, but Milly intervened neatly with the presentation of Mr. Cheesewright, in itself a little masterpiece of quiet humor.
Princess Bedalia’s reception of Mr. Charles Cheesewright was perhaps the severest test to which her sterling goodness had been exposed. Every nerve was on edge. She wanted to slay Mr. Cheesewright, braided coat, turquoise tie-pin, diamond sleeve links, immaculate coiffure and all. But for the sake of Milly she dragooned her feelings to the pitch of bowing quite charmingly.
Luncheon, after all, was not so bad. Mrs. Wren was frankly at her worst and most tactless; her one idea was to impress the guest, to let him see that money was not everything, and that judged by her standards he was a most ordinary young man. For such a democrat her table talk was surprisingly full of Debrett. It was all very lacerating, but Mary continued to play up as well as she knew how. And by the time the meal was half over the reward of pure unselfishness came to her in the shape of a quite unexpected liking for Mr. Charles Cheesewright.
By all the rules of the game, that is, if mere outward appearance went for anything, Mr. Cheesewright should have been insufferable. But at close quarters, with curried prawns and chablis before him, and a very fine girl opposite, he was nothing of the kind. Mrs. Wren had confided to Mary a week ago, “that she was afraid from what she had heard, that he was not out of the top drawer.” The statement had been provoked by an odious comparison with Wrexham, “who,” declared Milly in her most aboriginal manner, “had, as far as mother was concerned, simply queered the pitch for everybody.”
Perhaps in the eyes of Mary it was Mr. Cheesewright’s supreme merit that, in spite of his clothes, he was modestly content to be his humble self. In every way he was a very middling young man. But he knew that he was and, in Mary’s opinion, that somehow saved him from being something worse. Mrs. Wren was far from agreeing. His face and form were plebeian, but there was no reason why he should take them lying down. He was Eton and Cambridge certainly—or was it Harrow and Oxford?—anyhow an adequate expression of a sound convention; and it was for that reason no doubt that all through a particularly trying meal he kept up his end bravely. In fact, he did so well that he earned the gratitude of the young woman opposite, although he was far from suspecting that he had done anything of the kind.
She had begun by counting the minutes and in looking ahead to the time when she could retire with her wounds. But there was a peculiar virtue in the meal; at any rate it agreed so well with the natural constitution of Mr. Charles Cheesewright that he was able to relieve the tension of the little dining-room without knowing it. He wasn’t brilliant, certainly, but he talked plainly, sanely, modestly about the things that mattered; the Brodotsky Venus at the Portman Gallery, the miserable performance of Harrow, the new play at the Imperial, the sure defeat of America’s Big Four, Mr. Jarvey’s new novel, the prospect of the Kaiser lifting the pot at Cowes, and other matters of international importance, so that by the time coffee and crême-de-menthe had rounded up the meal, Mary was inclined to feel sorry that it was at an end.