The bride had tripped upstairs to put on her going-away gown, attended by Leila and Sheila and some freshly-married women, who meant to struggle for the slippers for second choice.
Loud, explosive bursts of jeering merriment came from the dining-room, where most of the men of the party had congregated. An exhausted maid and a very obvious private detective hovered in the neighborhood of the display of wedding presents, and through the open door of the drawing-room one caught a glimpse of suspiciously new luggage piled up in the hall, and a little group of youths and maidens of the callower kind, who were industriously packing the sunshades and umbrellas in the holdalls with rice and confetti.
“My poor, poor boy has been in and out of love hundreds of times,” moaned the despairing Dowager, “without once having been actually engaged. So that when I saw Gar with these three women sitting on four green chairs in the Park in May, I was not seriously alarmed. Georgiana Bayham told me that the stout woman with too many bangles was a Mrs. Rollo Polkingham, a widow, of whom nobody who might with truth be styled anybody had ever heard, and that she had a wild, jungly house in Chesterfield Crescent—(don’t those climbing peacocks in the wall-paper set your teeth on edge?)—and always asked young men to call—and wanted to know their intentions at the third visit.... ‘I would give this turquoise charm off my porte-bonheur,’ said Georgiana, in her loud, bubbling voice, ‘to know which of the two daughters Gar is smitten with. The girl with the eyes like black ballot-balls, or the other with the Gaiety smile.’ ... My dear, it was the dark one, Leila, as it happened. Not that Gar flirted desperately. But they went to Hurlingham and lunched at Prince’s, and then the mother thought my boy hooked, and struck——”
“Asked his intentions?” I hinted.
“I knew something had happened,” said Gar’s mother, “when he came in to tea with me that very afternoon. ‘Mother, am I a villain?’ were his very words. ‘No, dear,’ I said, ‘do you feel like one?’ Then it came out that the Polkingham woman had asked his intentions with regard to Leila; and never having had such a thing done to him before, poor, dear boy! Gar was quite prostrated. He did not deny that he found the eldest Polkingham girl attractive, but secretly he had been more closely drawn to the second, Sheila.”
“The pink doll,” I murmured.
“He behaved with the nicest honor in the matter,” declared Lady Garlingham. “When he told me he was really in love with Sheila, and could never be happy until he had married her—and how a young woman with such a muddy complexion could inspire such a passion I don’t pretend to know—I said: ‘Very well, you have my permission to tell her so. I shall never stand in the way of your happiness, my son—although these people are not in Our Set.’ If you had seen his shining eyes. If you had heard the thrill in his voice as he said, ‘What a rattling good sort you are, mother!’ you would have felt with me that the sacrifice was worth it. And then he rushed off in a hansom to declare himself.” Lady Garlingham clutched my arm painfully.
“To declare himself to Sheila?”
“And came back within the space of half an hour engaged to Leila,” panted Lady Garlingham. “No, don’t laugh!”
“The b-blue d-doll!” I gasped.