“You left cards on us this afternoon, I understand, but I don’t think you left a niece. The footman would have been sure to have mentioned it if you had. Is it going to be a fashion to leave nieces on people as well as cards? I hope not; some of these houses in Berkeley-square have practically no accommodation for that sort of thing.”
“She’s not at the Carrywoods’,” announced Jane, returning to her tea; “now I come to think of it, perhaps I left her at the silk counter at Selfridge’s. I may have told her to wait there a moment while I went to look at the silks in a better light, and I may easily have forgotten about her when I found I hadn’t your pattern with me. In that case she’s still sitting there. She wouldn’t move unless she was told to; Louise has no initiative.”
“You said you tried to match the silk at Harrod’s,” interjected the dowager.
“Did I? Perhaps it was Harrod’s. I really don’t remember. It was one of those places where every one is so kind and sympathetic and devoted that one almost hates to take even a reel of cotton away from such pleasant surroundings.”
“I think you might have taken Louise away. I don’t like the idea of her being there among a lot of strangers. Supposing some unprincipled person was to get into conversation with her.”
“Impossible. Louise has no conversation. I’ve never discovered a single topic on which she’d anything to say beyond ‘Do you think so? I dare say you’re right.’ I really thought her reticence about the fall of the Ribot Ministry was ridiculous, considering how much her dear mother used to visit Paris. This bread and butter is cut far too thin; it crumbles away long before you can get it to your mouth. One feels so absurd, snapping at one’s food in mid-air, like a trout leaping at may-fly.”
“I am rather surprised,” said the dowager, “that you can sit there making a hearty tea when you’ve just lost a favourite niece.”
“You talk as if I’d lost her in a churchyard sense, instead of having temporarily mislaid her. I’m sure to remember presently where I left her.”
“You didn’t visit any place of devotion, did you? If you’ve left her mooning about Westminster Abbey or St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, without being able to give any satisfactory reason why she’s there, she’ll be seized under the Cat and Mouse Act and sent to Reginald McKenna.”
“That would be extremely awkward,” said Jane, meeting an irresolute piece of bread and butter halfway; “we hardly know the McKennas, and it would be very tiresome having to telephone to some unsympathetic private secretary, describing Louise to him and asking to have her sent back in time for dinner. Fortunately, I didn’t go to any place of devotion, though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army procession. It was quite interesting to be at close quarters with them, they’re so absolutely different to what they used to be when I first remember them in the ’eighties. They used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort of smiling rage with the world, and now they’re spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions. Laura Kettleway was going on about them in the lift of the Dover Street Tube the other day, saying what a lot of good work they did, and what a loss it would have been if they’d never existed. ‘If they had never existed,’ I said, ‘Granville Barker would have been certain to have invented something that looked exactly like them.’ If you say things like that, quite loud, in a Tube lift, they always sound like epigrams.”