Twice or thrice during this chrysalis period she stole out of nights with Myra to the dress circle of a theatre, where, besides ingenuous joy in the drama, she found unconfessed consolation in the company of homely folk like herself—girls in clean blouses or simple little frocks like her own, and young men either in well-worn khaki or morning dress. On these occasions she wondered very much what she was about to do in the other galley—that of the expensively furred and jewelled haughtinesses and impudences whom she shouldered in the vestibule crush and whom she saw drive away in luxurious limousines. These flashing personalities frightened her with their implied suggestions of worlds beyond her ken. One woman made especial impression on her—a woman tall, serene, with a clear-cut face, vaguely familiar, and a beautiful voice; she overheard a commonplace phrase or two addressed to the escorting man. She brushed Olivia’s arm and turned with a smile and a word of gracious apology and passed on. Olivia caught a whisper behind her. “That’s the Marchioness of Aintree. Isn’t she lovely?” But she did not need to be told that she had been in contact with a great lady. And she went home doubting exceedingly whether, for all her flourish of social trumpets, Lydia Dawlish’s galley was that of Lady Aintree.
Criticism of Lydia, however, she put behind her as ingratitude, for Lydia made up royally for past negligence. Time and energy that ought to have been devoted to Lydia, Ltd., was diverted to the creation of Olivia.
“I don’t know why you’re so good to me,” she would say.
And the other, with a little mocking smile round her lips: “It’s worth it. I’m giving myself a new experience.”
The first occasion on which she went out into the great world was that of Sydney Rooke’s party. She knew that her low-cut, sleeveless, short-skirted gown of old gold tissue had material existence, but she felt herself half-ashamedly, half-deliciously clad in nothing but a bodily sensation. A faint blush lingered in her cheeks all the evening. Lydia, calling for her in Rooke’s car, which had been placed at her disposal, held her at arm’s length in sincere and noble admiration, moved by the artist’s joy in beholding the finished product of his toil, and embraced her fondly. Then she surveyed her again, from the little gold brocade slippers to the diamond butterfly (one of her mother’s bits of jewellery) in her dark wavy hair.
“You’re the daintiest elf in London,” she cried.
To the dinner at the Savoy Sydney Rooke had invited a white-moustached soldier, Major-General Wigram, whose blue undress uniform, to the bedazzlement of Olivia, gleamed with four long rows of multi-coloured ribbon; a vivacious middle-aged woman, Mrs. Fane Sylvester, who wrote novels, plays, books of travel, and fashion articles in a weekly periodical—Olivia learned all this in their first five-minute converse in the lounge; Sir Paul and Lady Barraclough, he a young baronet whose civilian evening dress could not proclaim hard-won distinctions, she a pretty, fair, fragile creature, both of them obviously reacting joyously to relaxation of tension; and, last, the Vicomte de Mauregard, of the French Embassy, young, good looking, who spoke polished English with a faultless accent. It was, socially, as correct a little party as the brooding, innocent spirit of Mrs. Gale could have desired for her about-to-be prodigal daughter. Olivia sat between her host and Mauregard. On her host’s right was Lady Barraclough; then the General, then Lydia, then Sir Paul, facing Rooke at the round table, then Mrs. Fane Sylvester, who was Mauregard’s left-hand neighbour. They were by the terrace windows, far from what Olivia, with her fresh mind playing on social phenomena, held then and ever afterwards, most rightly, to be the maddening and human intercourse-destroying band.
Not that her first entrance down the imposing broad staircase, into the lounge filled with mirifically vestured fellow-creatures, to the accompaniment of a clashing rag-time imbecility, did not set all her young nerves vibrating to the point of delicious agony. It was like a mad fanfare heralding her advent in a new world. But soon she found that the blare of the idiot music deadened all other senses. Before her eyes swayed black-and-white things whom at the back of her mind she recognized as men, and various forms all stark flesh, flashing jewels and a maze of colours, whom she knew to be women. The gathering group of her own party seemed but figures of a dream. Her unaccustomed ears could not catch a word of the conventional gambits of conversation opened, on introduction, by her fellow guests. It was only when they passed between the tables of the great restaurant and the horrible noise of the negroid, syncopated parody of tune grew fainter and fainter, and they reached the peace of the terrace side, that the maddening clatter faded from her ears and consciousness of her surroundings returned.
Then she surrendered herself to huge enjoyment. Both her neighbours had been all over the world and seen all sorts and conditions of men. They were vividly aware of current events. Pride would not allow her to betray the fact that often they spoke of matters far beyond her experience of men and things. Under their stimulus she began to regain the self that, for the past fortnight, the cardboard boxes of London had snowed under.