"I should love it," I replied, "but I'm afraid I must get back to work."
"Do you work?" she exclaimed with rapture. "How frightfully exciting."
At a Flapper dance in the evening I met Felicity again and she gave me the second "Hesitation Waltz." Afterwards she led me to some nice basket chairs in the conservatory.
"Well, did the Academy come off?" I asked.
"Did it come off?" said Felicity. "I should say so. It was the nicest afternoon I've had for weeks. You ought to have been there."
"I suppose your father was in hot form criticising the pictures?"
"Hush," she whispered, holding her finger to her lips. "Papa as an Art critic is temporarily under a cloud. I'll tell you. It came about in this way: Papa is a great admirer of Sargent, and to-day he was in a particularly Sargentesque mood. 'The great drawback to the Academy,' he said, as we were setting forth, 'is that the Sargents are spoiled by the other pictures. The huge mass of these all over the place entirely destroys one's perceptions of colour value. What I should like to do would be to see only the Sargents, turning a blind eye meanwhile to the other paintings.'"
"'You ought to wear blinkers,' I suggested.
"He was all for it at once.