“Oh, in bourgeois families no doubt, and with young people just setting up in the world; but Merewood is provided with linen. You can’t suppose mother and Jack have lived there without tablecloths or dusters. There is nothing for you to think about, Eve, but your own frocks, and we will think about them together. I adore shopping, and all the frivolities of life.”
Ten days later Eve was in London, a petted guest in one of the prettiest houses in Bruton Street. Lady Hartley had the knack of beautifying any house she lived in, even a furnished house, a tent that was to be shifted at the end of the season. Huge boxes of flowers were sent up from Redwold every other day to decorate those London rooms, and not content with this floral decoration, Maud Hartley was always buying things—china, lamps, baskets, elegant frivolities of all kinds, to make the hired house homelike.
She would apologize to her husband in an airy way for each fresh extravagance. “That pretty china plaque caught my eye at Howell and James’s while Eve and I were looking at their silks,” she would say.
Sir Hubert complained laughingly that if the Kohinoor were for sale at a London jeweller’s it would inevitably catch Maud’s eye.
“And her eye once caught she is hypnotized,” said Sir Hubert. “She must buy.”
Charles Street and Bruton Street are very near. Vansittart could run over, as his sister called it, at any and every hour of the day; and the result of this vicinity was that he lived more in his sister’s house than in his mother’s. But Mrs. Vansittart was kind, and seemed really pleased with her future daughter-in-law; so when Jack was not in Bruton Street Eve was in Charles Street, at luncheon sometimes, but oftener at afternoon tea, and at cosy little dinners, in the arrangement of which Mrs. Vansittart excelled. She knew a great many people in London, military, clerical, legal, literary, and artistic, and she knew how to blend her society and bring people together who really liked to meet each other.
This world of London in the season was a new world to Eve Marchant; these homes in which the pinch of poverty, the burden of debt, had never been felt, had a new atmosphere. Her spirits, gay even in the midst of household care, rose in these happier circles, and she charmed all who met her by her spontaneous graces of mind and manner, her quickness to perceive, her ready appreciation of wit and sense in others.
For Vansittart that month of May in the great city was a period of consummate happiness. The freshness of Eve’s feelings gave a new flavour to the commonest things. Parks and gardens, picture-galleries, concerts and theatres, were all new to her. Only on the rarest occasions had she been gratified by an evening in London and the sight of a famous actor. Her father had always excused himself from taking his daughters to any public amusements on the plea of poverty.
All the Marchant girls had known of London began and ended in the drapers’ shops and the after-season sales. To travel to town by an early train, third class, to tramp about all day in mud or dust, as the case might be, snatching a skimped luncheon at some homely pastry-cook’s, was the utmost they had known of metropolitan pleasures; and even days so unluxurious had been holidays for them. To see the shop windows, to have the spending of a little money, ever so little, meant happiness. It was only when they had emptied their purses that the shadow of care descended upon them, and they began to doubt whether they had invested their pittance wisely.