The opportunity came very much sooner than Baltazar had any reason to anticipate, in their meeting with Lady Edna Donnithorpe in the lounge of the Carlton.
Young, beautiful, royally assured, she advanced laughing to Baltazar.
“What about your promise, Mr. Baltazar? Pie-crust?”
He had sat next her at dinner a week before and she had invited him to come to tea one afternoon; to have a quiet, interesting talk, she said, away from crowds of disturbing people. She was the wife of the Parliamentary Secretary of one of the new ministries, the daughter of the Earl of Dunstable, and in other ways a woman of considerable importance. Her radiant photographs recurred week after week in the illustrated papers. Gossip whispered that she had turned the Prime Minister round her little finger and that when he had recovered from dizziness, he found he had given her elderly and uninspiring husband a place in the Government. Certainly no one was more surprised than Edgar Donnithorpe himself. That he owed his advancement to his wife was common knowledge; but alone of mortals he was unaware of the fact. When asked by a friend why she had gone to so much pains, she replied: “To get Edgar out of the way and give him something to play with.” She was twenty-five, pulling a hundred strings of fascinating intrigue, a flashing member of scores of war committees, and contrived for herself illimitable freedom.
Baltazar made his apologies. He meant to keep his promise, but it required courage on the part of such a back number as himself.
“Back number?” she cried. “Why, on your own showing you’ve only been in existence a few weeks. You are the newest thing in numbers in London.”
“It is gracious of you to say so,” replied Baltazar. Then, as she gave no sign of withdrawal: “Lady Edna, may I introduce my son—Lady Edna Donnithorpe.”
“I thought it must be. How do you do?” There were dovenotes in her voice which, to the young man’s fancy, invested the commonplace formula with caressive significance; her liquid dark blue eyes regarded him understandingly and pityingly; her hand lingered in a firm clasp for just an appreciable fraction of a second.
“Don’t you agree with me about your father? You and I are old, wise, battered people compared with him?”