"Dear Lady Perivale, I know you are at home on Wednesday, so I thought I would take my courage in my two hands, and call on you, in the hope of interesting you in the bazaar at the Riding School. The cause is such a good one—providing bicycles for daily governesses of small means. I think you know my girls, Flora and Nora?"
Grace was coldly civil. She promised to think about the bicycles, and she began to pour out tea, which had just been brought in.
"My girls" composed themselves upon low chairs, whisking the rose-coloured flounces under their pale-green frocks into due prominence, unconscious of a slightly draggled effect in skirts that had done church parade on three Sundays. They scanned the spacious drawing-rooms with eyes accustomed to the band-box limitations of a flat in West Kensington, where, if a sudden gust blew, one could shut the window with one hand, and the door with the other.
How vast and splendid the rooms were, and yet Lady Perivale was only a country parson's daughter! They appraised her beauty, and wondered at her good luck. They took in every detail of her pale lavender frock—softest silk, tucked, and frilled, and ruched, and pleated, by a fashionable dressmaker, until, by sheer needle-work, twenty yards of China silk were made to look worth forty guineas. There was more work in that little visiting-gown than in six of Nora's frocks, although she spent most of her morning hours at her sewing machine.
"How delicious it must be to be so rich," thought Flora. "And what can a trumpery scandal matter to a woman with a house in Grosvenor Square and powdered footmen? It's ridiculous of mother to be 'poor thing-ing' her."
"Flora and Nora are helping Lady de Green at the tea-stall," Mrs. Wilfred explained. "They mean to have a quite original tea, don't you know; Japanese cups and saucers, and tiny brown and white sandwiches."
"Nora has a German friend who can make thirty kinds of sandwiches," said Flora. "I believe sandwich cutting ranks before Wagner's music as an accomplishment in Berlin."
Three young men straggled in while the tea was circulating. They were men whom Lady Perivale knew very well, but they were not in the best set, not the men with highly placed mothers and sisters, whose presence gives a cachet. She thought them a shade too empressé in their satisfaction at her return to town. They hoped she was going to give some of her delightful parties, and that she was not going to waste time before she sent out her cards.
"The season is so short nowadays. Everybody rushes off to some German cure before July is half over," said Mr. Mordaunt, a clerk at the Admiralty.
Nobody asked Lady Perivale where she had spent the winter. She hated them for their reticence, hated them for finding her in the emptiness of her three drawing-rooms, with only that detestable Mrs. Wilfred, and still more hateful Flora and Nora. It was so much worse than being quite alone. But she had sworn to herself to stay in Grosvenor Square, and could not deny herself to detrimentals. Nobody stopped long. Mrs. Wilfred did not feel her visit a success, and the men saw that Lady Perivale was bored.