“The dear boys! They are asking if they shall play the Pastorale for me. Look at their eyes!” she said.
Craven did not bother to do that, but looked instead at hers, wondering a little at her widespread energy in net casting. Was it possible that once Lady Sellingworth had been like that, ceaselessly on the lookout for worship, requiring it as a right, even from men who were hairdressers in the daytime? As the musicians began to play he met her eyes again and felt sure that it could not have been so. Whatever she had done, whatever she had been, she could never have frequented the back stairs. That thought seemed a rather cruel thrust at Miss Van Tuyn. But there is a difference in vanities. Wonderful variety of nature!
When the players had finished the Pastorale and “A Mezzanotte,” and had been rewarded by a long look of thanks from Miss Van Tuyn which evidently drove them over the borders of admiration into the regions of unfulfilled desire, Lady Sellingworth said she must go. And then an unexpected thing happened. It appeared that Miss Van Tuyn had asked a certain famous critic, who though English by birth was more Parisian than most French people, to call for her at the restaurant and take her on to join a party at the Cafe Royal. She, therefore, could not go yet, and she begged Lady Sellingworth to stay on and to finish up the evening in the company of Georgians at little marble tables. But Lady Sellingworth laughingly jibbed at the Cafe Royal.
“I should fall out of my assiette there!” she said.
“But no one is ever surprised at the Cafe Royal, dearest. It is the one place in London where—Ah! here is Jennings come to fetch us!”
A very small man, with a pointed black beard and wandering green eyes, wearing a Spanish sombrero and a black cloak, and carrying an ebony stick nearly as tall as himself, at this moment slipped furtively into the room, and, without changing his delicately plaintive expression, came up to Miss Van Tuyn and ceremoniously shook hands with her.
Lady Sellingworth looked for a moment at Craven.
“May I escort you home?” he said. “At any rate, let me get you a taxi.”
“Lady Sellingworth, may I introduce Ambrose Jennings,” said Miss Van Tuyn in a rather firm voice at this moment.
Lady Sellingworth bent kindly to the little man far down below her. After a word or two she said: