“We are old friends, or were,” said I, for people always became sentimental in the vicinity of Lady Garlingham. “Tell me how it happened!”
“Oh, how——” Lady Garlingham adroitly turned a slight groan into a little cough. “Indeed, I hardly know. All that seems burned into me is that I have become a dowager without adequate cause.”
Her pretty brown eyebrows crumpled; she dabbed her still charming eyes with an absurd little lace handkerchief. She wore a wonderful dress of something filmy in Watteau blue, and a Lamballe hat with a paradis. Through innumerable veils of tulle her complexion was really wonderful, considering, and her superb hair still tawny gold.
“Don’t look at me and ask yourself why I’ve never married again,” she commanded, in the old petulant way. “For Gar’s sake, is the stereotyped answer to that. And when I look at her——” She dabbed away a tear with the absurd little handkerchief. “She hasn’t had the indecency to call me ‘Mother’ yet.... But she will, I know she will! If she doesn’t, she is more than human. I have said such things to her.”
“I can quite believe it,” I agreed.
Champagne cups were going about; infinitesimal sandwiches, tabloids of condensed indigestion, were being washed down. The best man, an Attaché friend of Garlingham’s, brandishing a silver-handled carving-knife, was encouraging the bridling bride to attack the cake. Sheila and Leila hovered near with silver baskets, and Garlingham, with the merest shadow of his old easy insouciance, was replying to the statute and legendary chaff of the other men.
“You know he was engaged to the second girl, Sheila, first?” went on Lady Garlingham plaintively.
I had not known it, and it gave me a thrill.
“Indeed!” I said in a tone of polite inquiry.
“When he was a very little boy, and I took him into a shop to buy a toy,” said poor Lady Garlingham, “he always was in raptures with it, whatever it was, until we were half-way home, and then nothing would satisfy him but the carriage being turned round and driven back, so that he might exchange the thing for something he had particularly disliked at first.”