She read the announcement of the lady of (deleted) title who was willing, for a substantial consideration, to introduce gentlefolk of means and their daughters to the most exclusive social circles.
She read the naïve solicitation of the alleged ex-officer of the B.E.F., who had won through the war with every known decoration except the Double Cross of the Order of St. Gall and with nothing of his anatomy left whole except his cheek, begging some great-hearted soul to buy him a barrel organ to play in the streets.
And then her eye was arrested by the appearance of her own name in the text of a brief advertisement, which she read naturally, with heightened interest:
IF MICHAEL LANYARD will communicate privately he will hear news of Sofia his daughter. Address Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, W.C. 3
IV
MUTINY
Sofia had never heard the name of Michael Lanyard. Neither did the firm style of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, mean anything to her. Notwithstanding, she wasted more time than she knew trying to picture to herself a man who looked like Michael Lanyard sounded, and wishing (no matter what his looks might be) that she were his long-lost daughter Sofia, and that he would see the advertisement, and communicate privately as requested, and hear news of her, and come speeding in a Rolls-Royce to the Café des Exiles, and walk in and humble Papa Dupont with a look of hauteur and confound Mama Thérèse with a peremptory word, and take Sofia by the hand and lead her out and induct her into such an environment as suited her rightful station: said environment necessarily comprising a town house if not on Park Lane at least nearly adjacent to it, and a country house sitting, in the mellowed beauty of its Seventeenth Century architecture, amid lordly acres of velvet lawn and private park.
She hoped the country house would be within sight of the sea, and that the family garage would run to a comfortable little town-car for her personal use when she went shopping in Bond Street, or to pay calls or leave cards, or to concerts and matinees....
At about this stage her châteaux en Espagne began to rock upon their foundations; a seismic phenomenon due to the appearance of Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which meal they habitually consumed in the café when the evening rush was over, the tables undressed, and the establishment had settled down to drowse away the dull hours till closing time.
Thus reminded that it was nine o’clock or thereabouts of a stuffy evening in a stodgy world where nothing ever happened that hadn’t wearily happened the day before and the day before that and so back to the beginning of Time, and wasn’t scheduled tediously to continue happening to-morrow and the day after and so on to the end of Eternity, Sofia sighed and shook herself and put away the vanity of dreams.
But her beauty, as she sat brooding, was as sultry as the night.