Phyllis Lane was a good actress—what woman is not? To judge from her gay attitude as she entered Mrs. Barrimore’s drawing-room, one would never have imagined that she was a bride of a few hours, with her bridegroom speeding away to India.
The pink lamp-shade shed a warm glow over the pretty low-ceilinged room which was heavy with the scent of pink carnations—Mrs. Barrimore’s favorite flower. Mrs. Barrimore wore some of them pinned into the lace of her pearl-grey evening dress, and the color was faintly repeated in her cheeks. She had the complexion of a girl in her teens, and her slightly waving nut-brown hair was without a silver streak.
Her figure was softly rounded and slim as it had been at twenty. As Colonel Lane had said, she looked a girl, despite her over forty years.
She was sitting among the amber cushions on her favorite Chesterfield, where Colonel Lane joined her.
A band struck up a gay waltz in Alexandra Park. Mrs. Barrimore’s grey eyes brightened. “I love a band,” she said. “There is a fête in the park to-night, I can see the illuminations through the trees. How that music makes one wish to dance! Do you know, Colonel, I can’t help forgetting that I am middle-aged. Philip is sometimes a little shocked, I think. He thinks me quite old, and only to-day said, ‘Mother, don’t you think you ought to wear a bonnet?’ I began to think that perhaps I ought. It had never occurred to me before.”
“Bonnet!” exclaimed the Colonel. “It would be ridiculous. You would look really odd in one, with your face and figure. Philip has some very foolish ideas. That bungalow, for instance. I understand that he is going to live there with a manservant.”
Mrs. Barrimore’s pink deepened to carnation in her cheeks.
“Oh, you don’t understand,” she said, up in arms at once in defence of her boy. “Philip wants solitude—he needs it to write his books. He can’t get it here. Dear Robert won’t leave him alone. Young people, even the best, find it difficult to put up with the peculiarities of older folk. It is later on that the once young look back, and love these same older folk for these same peculiarities. It is all the same annoyance with old folks and infants, and I remember myself how angry it used to make me when Philip—he was little Philly then—left his sticky finger-prints on the window-glass—and now that my baby is a man, I would give—oh, what would I not give!—to see those sticky finger-prints again!”
Colonel Lane saw the tender eyes grow bright with unshed tears.
He cleared his throat.