In London the innumerable bazaars and fêtes given to swell the various funds of relief were the principal functions of the fashionable world. Jim, who had just returned from a visit to Scotland over the holiday season, was standing near a stall in Albert Hall, presided over by Mrs. Hobart Chichester Chichester Jones. As she eagerly turned towards him there was no doubt of the American woman's desire to gain his approbation. A friendship had sprung up between them since Jim's return from India, and her frankness amused him. It was Sadie Jones's second year in London, and the half of the great houses that had been denied her the previous year were now open to her and she was a much sought personage at their festivities.
Whether this was due to her insouciant face with its tip-tilted nose, or the slight lisp that made her American accent seem so fetching, her friends could not decide. Her enemies—and Sadie Jones had them at Battle Creek—declared it was her charming characteristic of never remembering a social slight; of generously forgiving the offender and in true Christian spirit offering the other cheek. They forgot what Jim and her sponsors in London could plainly see—it was her frankness that razed to the ground her social barrier. When she spoke quite frankly of a boarding-house her mother had kept in a mining-town where Hobart Jones had been a paying guest, and told in picturesque exaggeration of her starved youth and pitiful hatred of her environment—of the longing to escape to the great life of Europe with its men and women of tradition—she disarmed the gossips. She frankly acknowledged what was her detractors' store of tittle-tattle. It was a unique game and it won.
Jim watched her with tolerant interest as she inveigled a young guardsman into giving a substantial donation to the cause. As he idly surveyed the scene he wondered at Diana's failure to attend the fête. The tired women who had been in attendance were disposing of the remains of their stock. The eager crowd that had thronged the hall and paid a half-crown to be served tea by a duchess, or to see a peeress act as barmaid in rivalry to a popular Rosalind of the stage, was gradually thinning out.
Jim started to leave the flag-bedecked hall with its litter of packages and debris-strewn floor as proofs of the day's profitable traffic. Sadie Jones, who had been skilfully effecting her sales and keeping him in sight, turned to him.
"Wait and drive home with me to dinner. The brougham's at the door. I have news for you of Lady Kerhill. I have just returned from a visit."
Mrs. Jones lived in a box of a house in Curzon Street. It was a setting especially designed to suit her small, birdlike personality. But Jim's stalwart frame seemed grotesquely out of proportion in the small French salon. The dinner was an amusing tête-à-tête with Sadie at her most vivacious best, telling anecdotes of the plains she loved.
"Sometimes I long for the smell of the alkali. It chokes one, but I find the fogs far harder to swallow. I was bred to it."
Hitherto her descriptions of the prairie had often made Jim long to see the country she painted so vividly. Suddenly she turned to Jim and with quick decision said:
"I can't understand your Englishman's point of view. Why, in America, if Hoby Jones had treated me as Lord Kerhill is treating his wife, there would be ructions. Yes, ructions," she calmly went on, in answer to Jim's look of amazement. "Lord Kerhill is your cousin, I know, but Lady Kerhill is an angel. Why don't you do something?"
For a moment Jim could not quite grasp her irrelevant outburst. Then he learned that Diana's failure to appear at the bazaar was due to days of accumulated anxiety at the Towers. Henry had been away for a week without a word of explanation to those at home.