"You are thinking of John Kendal! Ah, there it becomes exciting. From what you see, Janetta mia, what should you think? Myself, I don't quite know. Don't you find him rather—a good deal—interested?"
Janet had an impulse of thankfulness for the growing darkness. "I—I see him so seldom!" she said. Oh, it was the last time, the very last time that she would ever let Elfrida talk like this.
"Well, I think so," Elfrida went on coolly. "He fancies he finds me curious, original, a type—just now. I dare say he thinks he takes an anthropological pleasure in my society! But in the beginning it is all the same thing, my dear, and in the end it will be all the same thing. This delicious Loti," and she picked up "Aziade"—"what an anthropologist he is—with a feminine bias!"
Janet was tongue-tied. She struggled with herself for an instant, and then, "I wish you'd stay and dine," she said desperately.
"How thoughtless of me!" Elfrida replied, jumping up. "You ought to be dressing, dear. No, I can't; I've got to sup with some ladies of the Alhambra to-night—it will make such lovely copy. But I'll go now, this very instant."
Half-way downstairs Janet, in a passion of helpless tears, heard Elfrida's footsteps pause and turn. She stepped swiftly into her own room and locked the door. The footsteps came tripping back into, the library, and then a tap sounded on Janet's door. Outside Elfrida's voice said plaintively, "I had to come back. Do you love me—are you quite sure you love me?"
"You humbug!" Janet called from within, steadying heir voice with an effort, "I'm not at all sure. I'll tell you to-morrow!"
"But you do!" cried Elfrida, departing. "I know you do."
CHAPTER XX.
July thickened down upon London. The society papers announced that with the exception of the few unfortunate gentlemen who were compelled to stay and look after their constituents' interests, at Westminster, "everybody" had gone out of town, and filled up yawning columns with detailed information as to everybody's destination. To an inexperienced eye, with the point of view of the top of an Uxbridge Road omnibus for instance, it might not appear that London had diminished more than the extent of a few powdered footmen on carriage boxes; but the census of the London world is after all not to be taken from the top of an Uxbridge Road omnibus. London teemed emptily, the tall houses in the narrow lanes of Mayfair slept standing, the sunlight filtered through a depressing haze and stood still in the streets for hours together. In the Park the policemen wooed the nursery-maids free from the embarrassing smiling scrutiny of people to whom this serious preoccupation is a diversion. The main thoroughfares were full of "summer sales," St. Paul's echoed to admiring Transatlantic criticism, and the Bloomsbury boarding-houses to voluble Transatlantic complaint.