As he crossed the room, Eric sat down in the empty chair by Ivy Maitland’s side. It was ungracious to accept a favour from a man and then, in the next breath, to disparage him; but, after Gaymer’s unmannerly conduct at Mrs. O’Rane’s party, any one might feel a little sorry to see Ivy becoming his friend. Before the war he had been a leader in the disorderly little group of roystering practical jokers headed by Jack Summertown and Pentyre; and, though the Air Force had kept him employed for three or four years, he seemed now to be casting about for fresh forms of dissipation and rather aimless mischief. While Ivy was too young and, at heart, too timid to amuse him for long, her behaviour on the boat had been feather-brained; it was, of course, their business, but Eric would have preferred to see her with some one who checked her youthful craving for independence instead of exciting it.
“Where are you dancing?” he asked her.
“Ssh! Please!,” she whispered. “I wish Johnnie hadn’t shouted it out like that! Mother’d have a fit, if she knew I was going to a dance alone.”
Eric wondered for a moment whether she was yielding to the youthful temptation of trying to shock him.
“Your parents seem still to be a great trial to you,” he observed.
“I’ve made some impression on them. Johnnie’s got me a job at the Air Ministry, and they’ve allowed me to take it. The real fight’s coming when I tell them I’ve taken rooms of my own.”
“Are you going to live alone?”
“I think so. The girl who was coming with me has cried off... Now, it’s no use finding fault with me, because I’ve absolutely made up my mind. I must lead my own life!”
“I think it’s an awful mistake,” said Eric with a shrug. “You’re much too young, much too good-looking...” After saying good-bye at Liverpool, he had forgotten her very existence; but in a short and flimsy blue dance-frock, with blue stockings, shoes and head-band she was younger and more provocative than he remembered either at their first meeting in New York or on board the Lithuania. “Girls of nineteen do not leave home and set up housekeeping on their own,” he added.
“But why shouldn’t they? I know several who do.”