"Who is she?"
"Joyce Davenant, the queen bee of the swarm. Dine with me to-night at the Ritz; seven o'clock, I'm afraid, but we are going to a first night."
"Is she a daughter of old Jasper Davenant? I used to shoot with him."
"The younger daughter. Do you know her sister, Mrs. Wylton? She's coming too. You'd better meet her," he went on with a touch of acidity in his tone, "you'll hear her name so much during the next few months that it will be something to say you've seen her in the flesh."
I only remembered Elsie Wylton as a young girl with her hair down her back. Of her husband, Arnold Wylton, I suppose every one has heard; he enjoys the reputation of being a man who literally cannot be flogged past a petticoat. How such a girl came to marry such a man no rational person has ever been able to explain; and it never sweetens the amenities of debate to talk vaguely of marriages being made in heaven. I met Wylton twice, and on both occasions he was living in retirement abroad. I have no wish to meet him a third time.
"How did she ever come to marry a fellow like that?" I asked.
Aintree shrugged his shoulders.
"Her father was dead, or he'd have stopped it. Nobody else felt it their business to interfere, and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference if they had. You know what the Davenants are like—or perhaps you don't. Nothing shakes them when they've made up their minds to do a thing."
"But didn't she know the man's reputation?" I persisted.
"I don't suppose so. Wylton had never been mixed up in any overt scandal, so the women wouldn't know; and it's always a tall order for a man to lay information against another man when a girl's engaged to marry him. She just walked into it with her eyes shut."