But she had proved very unapproachable, even behind the most sheltering palms in the conservatory with its cunningly shaded lights. And he did not want to frighten her.
"There is something about you," he said, "which reminds one of a tune one has heard and lost and which one always hopes someone will come along humming so that one may recapture it for ever."
"But there are some tunes," Ferlie replied, "which, having recaptured, one would give a great deal to lose again."
His was not a very fertile brain and he clung passionately to his simile, which had struck him as perfect in its way; so passionately that anyone more sophisticated than Ferlie might have suspected him, with perfect justification, of being a little drunk. But she was growing sleepy and merely thought it exceedingly civil of him to insist on seeing her home.
His own car replaced the taxi that had brought her. She took leave of her hostess impervious to the launched arrows of half-a-hundred eyes.
Had Greville-Mainwaring not given his chauffeur leave of absence and so found himself obliged to drive the new Crossley, Ferlie might not have been so ready to accord him polite permission to call. So indifferent that permission. She was really uncertain of the correct procedure and, in her preoccupied state, took the easiest course, and then forgot Mainwaring in finding a letter from Cyprian awaiting her on the hall table.
Not till Lady Cardew put in an ecstatic appearance on the following Sunday afternoon did Mrs. Carmichael learn that her daughter had been considered "the success of the evening."
"Quite like an advertisement for Pompeian Scent or Powder, or whatever it is that is supposed to attract the elusive male," said Lady Cardew, warmly sympathetic with Mrs. Carmichael's reverse of fortune and very much alive to the possibility of doing her a real good turn. "My dear! Only imagine if something came of it!"
Mrs. Carmichael was a little fluttered. One had pictured Ferlie being introduced by her father, in due course, to the eligible officials of Burma. Though that dream had faded this was, to put it tritely, so sudden. And Ferlie's own silence seemed remarkable. Lady Cardew misread it.
"Girlish dignity, Linda. She could hardly assume anything on an evening's acquaintance, even if these modern young people waste very little time. And though there are the usual rumours that Clifford has been a bit wild, you and I, as women of the world, realize that it is better for a young man to have That Kind of Thing behind him than before."