This afternoon, however, Mame was not feeling quite so raw as she had done. Clanborough House combined with the letter from New York had somehow given her a more substantial basis. It is wonderful what a feeling of success can do. Besides, Lady Violet, as usual, was just as easy as pie.
She told the visitor how pleased she was to see her and fixed her snugly in a chair.
“When are you thinking of going home?”
“I expect I’ll stay on through the summer now.” Mame had a slight air of importance. “I like the life here and I’ve just had a commission to report it for the New York Monitor.”
“That’ll be interesting.”
Mame hoped it would be. If she was careful how she played her cards it might be very interesting indeed, but the problem of the moment was the exact order in which to do so.
She was a creature of quick intuitions. And she promptly decided that the perfect frankness which up till now had served her so well was decidedly the card to bank on.
To go around, to see things from the inside, to get into the swim was Mame’s ambition and she naïvely confessed it to Lady Violet. This new friend did not discourage it. She did, indeed, seem a little amused, but not in the way of patronage or ill nature. Perhaps it was because this quaint thing from a land where Lady Violet herself had enjoyed jolly times was so liberally endowed with the quality that most appealed to her in man or woman, horse or hound. It was the quality best summed up by the good word “pluck,” which from their first chance meeting had inspired her with an honest desire to help this little American.
Something about Miss Amethyst De Rance had certainly touched Lady Violet. This girl was as different from the run of Americans with whom she occasionally rubbed shoulders on their native continent as chalk is different from cheese. And among her compatriots whom Lady Violet knew in London, not one in the least resembled her.
Obviously her general education was limited, but this girl was as live as a fire. She was very original; and her decidedly pretty head was full of ideas. Even if in the main they were directed to her own advancement, why blame her? But it was her way of saying things that appealed most strongly to this amateur of the human comedy. Lady Violet was a connoisseur, who in her spare time collected odd types of her fellow creatures, as other people collect postage stamps, foreign coins, pewter or old Sheffield. Moreover, having a keen, if rather freakish sense of fun, it pleased her sometimes to play one “type” off against another.