She drove their guest over in the car, Percy electing to ride with Gaunt, whom he was most anxious to propitiate. On the way, it was quite easy for Gerald to ask Joey where in London Mrs. Gaunt was staying.
"Well, I don't exactly know," said Joey. "She went up to the Langham, but directly her mother found that out, she determined that she would go there, too. I fancy the mother's a bit of a sponge, isn't she? Anyway, Virgie thought her husband wouldn't see keeping the two of them there, so she has gone into rooms with her mother, as being less expensive, and she always writes to me from the Nursing Home in Queen Anne Street."
"So she writes to you?"
"Yes. When they first married, Mr. Gaunt hadn't got a motor, so ours came in handy. I took her about a bit. She's a perfect angel. Hard on him, poor chap! having to let her go like this, isn't it? You can see how he is fretting!"
"Is he? He looks to me an ill-conditioned brute," said Gerald shortly.
"Oh, he's quite a good sort when you know him," replied Joey kindly.
"But as a husband for her——"
"Well, why didn't you chip in?"
"One can't always follow the dictates of the heart, Mrs. Ferris. I couldn't afford to marry for love."
"Well, of course, Gaunt is much too old for her, as far as years go; but," observed Joey, with one of her flashes of intuition, "he is absurdly young in the sense of not having used up his emotions. He was jilted in his youth, so they say, and ever since has imagined that he hated women—thought himself heart-broken, and shut himself up alone until one fine day he saw her. He has all the heaped-up love of a lifetime to pour out at her feet."