"Can I have spent so much on finery in a single season? Ah, by-the-by, I gave Kate Holloway a hat, and Emily Dashwood an ostrich fan, and Laura Vane had an ostrich boa, and a dozen long gloves. There are ever so many things I had forgotten." And now the Lauras and Emilys and Kates had other patronesses to eke out the paternal allowance, and they went gaily down the stream with the people who thought evil of Lady Perivale.
"We never were really intimate with her, don't you know?" they explained, to acquaintance who had seen them in her barouche or in her opera-box three or four times a week.
Her opera-box had been one of her chief splendours, a large box on the grand tier. Music was her delight, and, except for a scratch performance of Il Trovatore or La Traviata, she had seldom been absent from her place. It was at the opera that Colonel Rannock had been most remarkable in his attendance upon her. She liked him to be there, for it was pleasant to have the sympathy of a fine musician, whose critical faculty made him a delightful guide through the labyrinth of a Wagnerian opera. Their heads had been often seen bending over the score, he explaining, she listening as if enthralled. To the unmusical, that study of Wagner's orchestration seemed the thinnest pretext for confidential whispers, for lips hovering too near perfumed tresses and jewelled throat.
"No need to inquire for the Leit-motif, there," said the men in the stalls; and it was generally supposed that Lady Perivale meant to marry Colonel Rannock, in spite of all that the world had to say against him.
"If she hadn't carried on desperately with him last year one might hardly believe the story," said the people who had accepted the truth of the rumour without a moment's hesitation.
She occupied her opera-box this year, resplendent in satin and diamonds, radiating light on a tiara night from the circlet of stars and roses that trembled on their delicate wires as she turned her head from the stage to the auditorium. She had her visitors as of old: attachés, ambassadors even, literary men, musical men, painters, politicians. Coldly as she received them, she could not snub them, she could not keep them at bay altogether; and, after all, she had no grudge against the foreigners, and her box scintillated with stars on a gala night. It pleased her to face her detractors in that public arena, conspicuous by her beauty and her jewels.
There were waverers who would have liked to go to her, to hold out the hand of friendship, to laugh off the story of her infamy; but the fiat had gone forth, and she was taboo. The bellwether had scrambled up the bank and passed through the gap in the hedge, and all the other sheep must follow in that leading animal's steps. Life is too short for individual choice in a case of this kind.
She had half a mind to go to the May Drawing-room, and had no fear of repulse from Court officials, who are ever slow to condemn; but, on reflection, she decided against that act of self-assertion. She would not seem to appeal against the sentence that had been pronounced against her by confronting her traducers before the face of royalty. The card for the Marlborough House garden-party came in due course, but she made an excuse for being absent. She would not hazard an appearance which might cause annoyance to the Princess, who would perhaps have been told afterwards that Lady Perivale ought not to have been asked, and that it was an act of insolence in such a person to have written her name in the sacred book when she came to London.
But June had not come yet, and the royal garden-party was still a thing of the future.