“Oh, you are lonely!”
They shout on the telephone, people do, so that one cannot always hear them very, very well. But this fell lady’s slightly husky voice was considerate and clear.
“But fancy,” she said, “finding you at home now, and all the world at dinner or the play! Dear, are you, too, a social outcast? I am so sorry you have had to dine alone.”
“Iris, you should have brought up the friends of your childhood to a better understanding of the arts of peace. I was to have dined with Hilary to-night, and because of my engagement with him I did not go to a dinner where I was to sit beside a woman who has studied the Yogi philosophies and was divorced last year in New York with nine co-respondents, the tenth being disqualified on the ground that he was a black man weighing seventeen stone in his boots. And then Ross rings me up at half-past seven to say that Hilary has been called to the country!”
“Yes, I knew you had been put off for dinner. I was so shocked.”
“Thank you. But, Iris, you knew?”
“Oh, I know everything! But listen, I am ringing you up to ask you a plain question, and I would like, please, a plain answer. Does it mean anything to you that I am leaving England to-morrow at dawn?”
“You depress me, Iris Storm.”
“But I, oh I am so gay!”
“Yes, that is what depresses me. My friends are wretched, but you are gay! Iris, we are all of us miserable sinners, but you are a very captain of wickedness. Iris, you are a wrecker of homes, and you say you are gay! I am not being flippant. I have dined alone.”