She assented, and they slowly mounted the staircase together. Some of the evening's guests lounging about in the hall and loitering near the ballroom door, watched them go, and exchanged significant glances. One tall woman with black eyes and a viperish mouth, who commanded a certain exclusive "set" by virtue of being the wife of a dissolute Earl whose house was used as a common gambling resort, found out Mrs. Sorrel sitting among a group of female gossips in a corner, and laid a patronising hand upon her shoulder.
"Do tell me!" she softly breathed. "Is it a case?"
Mrs. Sorrel began to flutter immediately.
"Dearest Lady Larford! What do you mean!"
"Surely you know!" And the wide mouth of her ladyship grew still wider, and the black eyes more steely. "Will Lucy get him, do you think?"
Mrs. Sorrel fidgeted uneasily in her chair. Other people were listening.
"Really," she mumbled nervously—"really, dear Lady Larford!—you put things so very plainly!—I—I cannot say!—you see—he is more like her father——"
Lady Larford showed all her white teeth in an expansive grin.
"Oh, that's very safe!" she said. "The 'father' business works very well when sufficient cash is put in with it. I know several examples of perfect matrimonial bliss between old men and young girls—absolutely perfect! One is bound to be happy with heaps of money!"
And keeping her teeth still well exposed, Lady Larford glided away, her skirts exhaling an odour of civet-cat as she moved. Mrs. Sorrel gazed after her helplessly, in a state of worry and confusion, for she instinctively felt that her ladyship's pleasure would now be to tell everybody whom she knew, that Lucy Sorrel, "the new girl who was presented at Court last night," was having a "try" for the Helmsley millions; and that if the "try" was not successful, no one living would launch more merciless and bitter jests at the failure and defeat of the Sorrels than this same titled "leader" of a section of the aristocratic gambling set. For there has never been anything born under the sun crueller than a twentieth-century woman of fashion to her own sex—except perhaps a starving hyæna tearing asunder its living prey.