“But we want to start next week!” cried Olivia in dismay.
The young man at Cook’s professed polite but wearied sorrow at her disappointment. Forty times a day he had to disillusion eager souls who wanted to start next week for the other side of the globe.
“It is most inconvenient and annoying for us to change our plans,” Olivia declared resentfully. “But,” she added, with a smile, “it’s not your fault that the world is a perfect beast. We’ll talk it over and come to you again.”
So after lunch in town they returned to The Point, richer in their knowledge of the conditions of contemporary world travel.
“We’ll put things in hand at once and start about Christmas,” said Alexis. “Until then——”
“We’ll take a furnished flat in London,” Olivia decided.
October found them temporarily settled in a flat in the Buckingham Palace Road, and then began the life which Olivia had schemed for her husband before these disturbing dreams of vagabondage.
Towards the end of their stay in “Quien Sabe” various letters of enquiry and invitations had been forwarded to Triona from people, back now in London, with whom the success of his book had brought him into contact. These, careless youth, he had been for ignoring, but the wiser Olivia had stepped in and dictated tactful and informative replies. The result was their welcome in many houses remote from the Lydian galley, the Blenkiron home of Bolshevism and even the easy conservative dullness of the circle of Janet Philimore. The world that danced and ate and dressed and thought and felt to the unvarying rhythm of jazz music had passed away like a burnt-up planet. The world which she entered with her husband was astonishingly new with curious ramifications. At the houses of those whose cultivated pleasure in life it is to bring together people worthy of note she met artists, novelists, journalists, actors, publishers, politicians, travellers, and their respective wives or husbands. Jealously, at first, she watched the attitude of all these folk towards her husband: in pride and joy she saw him take his easy place among them as an equal. A minority of silly women flattered him—to his obvious distaste—but the majority accepted him on frank and honourable terms. She loved to watch him, out of the corner of her eye, across the drawing-room, his boyish face flushed and eager, talking in his swift, compelling way. His manners, so simple, so direct, so different from the elaboration of Sidney Rooke, even from the cut-and-dried convention of Mauregard, had a charm entirely individual. There was no one like him in the world.
In their turn, many of the people of note they met at the houses of the primary entertainers invited them to their homes. Thus, in a brief time, Olivia found herself swept into as interesting a social circle as the heart of ambitious young woman could crave. How far her own grace and wit contributed to their success it never entered her head to enquire.