There is a tide

by J. C. Snaith

Miss Childwick’s money would not have mattered so much, but where the snag came, as it seemed to Miss Du Rance, was that its statuesque owner, as Lady Violet also took an early opportunity of making known to her, was very keen on Bill. In other words, although Lady Violet did not put it quite so crudely, it was up to the little lady from Cowbarn, Iowa, to keep off the grass.

Speaking strictly by the card, there was of course no particular reason why Miss Du Rance should keep off the grass. Bill was fair game for any little angler who really understood the use of a bug and pole. But Lady Violet gave a sort of hint that it would hardly be cricket for Miss Du Rance to butt in and spoil things. Miss Childwick was so rich that everybody in London and Shropshire hoped very much that she and Bill were going to make a match of it.

That’s all very well, thought Mame. Evidently she considers it will be unsporting of me to dance more than twice with the dandiest bird on the bough. At all events, if these were not exactly Lady Violet’s own views, it was a fair presumption they were the views of Miss Childwick. In fact the Celebrated Three Ply Flannelette had already given the Funny Little American a once-over at pretty close range. Her fine eyes seemed to glow out at the good grey ones of Miss Du Rance from every quarter of the room. And each time they did so they seemed to glow with the light of battle.

Mame did not blame Miss Childwick altogether. Human nature is just as liable to be human nature at the Orient Dance Club, Knightsbridge, London, England, as at the Temple of Terpsichore, Cowbarn, Iowa, or any other dive you care to name.

No, Miss Du Rance did not really blame Miss Childwick for sending a sort of general warning along the wires. But where she did blame Miss Childwick was for trying to put one over on her. When she came to think about it afterwards she was not exactly sure that the Three Ply Flannelette had really meant to do that, but it certainly looked uncommonly like it. When you are mozing around with the real nutty bits of nougat in Knightsbridge, London, England, it is easier, no doubt, to be mistaken than in a small burg in a Middle Western state.

What really happened was, that after Miss Du Rance had put Bill through his paces the second time in three, and they had encored a vanilla ice and cracker, and were just going to take the floor the third time in four, up barges the Three Ply Flannelette, all smiles and politeness, yet with an undercurrent of just owning the earth, though perhaps not really meaning it. And Bill, for all his dyed-in-the-wool niceness, at heart a simpleton, chose that identical moment to make his old friend Miss Childwick known to his new friend, Miss Du Rance of Chicago.

If ever youth, since the world began, simply insisted on finding trouble, it was the tactless Bill. Miss Childwick’s eyes snapped and Miss Du Rance did not blame her. The eyes of Miss Du Rance snapped back and it is to be hoped that Miss Childwick attached no blame to her either. It was a mere temperamental action on the part of Miss Du Rance. Honours were easy over that course. But immediately there followed the passage, which, brief as it was, caused Mame seriously to ask herself whether this girl was not trying to put one over on her.

Perhaps, after all, it did not amount to that. When, in cool blood, in the seclusion of her chamber, Miss Du Rance pondered Miss Childwick, quietly and sincerely, extenuating nought, yet attributing nothing to her in malice, she reached the conclusion that she had no real ground of complaint against the Three Ply Flannelette, beyond the fact that it looked a little too superior. Perhaps it didn’t mean to really. But she was one of those trained-to-the-minute girls whom Mame had glimpsed from time to time taking the air on Riverside Drive, previous, as Paula Ling declared, to their sailing for Europe in search of a stray Italian prince or British earl.

Miss Childwick had just that air. You could not call it “lugs.” It was something deeper, more full of meaning and less irritating than the quality the Britishers speak of as “side.” She had an I-mean-to-be-a-marchioness-if-it-kills-me look about her, which did not accord with the democratic notions of Miss Du Rance. No, they could never be real friends. And that was why, having been warned to keep off the grass, little Miss Du Rance was not quite clear in her own little mind whether she was going to obey the signal.

After all, a cat may look at a king even if it is not allowed to look at a canary. What sport it would be to get into the cage when Miss Three Ply was not about. Before now such things had happened. In fact they were always happening. It would not be the first occasion by many that a small outsider had made her way into a private aviary.