About two o’clock in the morning Sydney Rooke and Lydia deposited Olivia at the front door of Victoria Mansions. Rooke stood hat in hand as she entered.
“I hope you’ve not been too bored by our little evening.”
“Bored! It has been just one heaven after another opening out before me.”
“But not the seventh. If only I could have provided that!”
“I’ll find it in the happiest and soundest night’s rest I ever had,” said Olivia.
CHAPTER VI
THIS was life; magical, undreamed of in her wildest Medlow dreams. And thanks to Lydia, she had plunged into it headlong, after a mere fortnight’s probation. There had been no disillusion. She had plunged and emerged into her kingdom. London conspired to strew her path with roses. The Barracloughs invited her to a dinner party at their home in Kensington. General Wigram offered her dinner and theatre and convened to meet her an old Indian crony, General Philimore, and his young daughter, Janet. Philimore had known her grandfather, Bagshawe of the Guides, when he was a subaltern, infinite ages ago. The world was a small place, after all. Olivia, caring little for grandfathers beyond their posthumous social guarantee, found youth’s real sympathy in Janet, who held open for her their flat in Maida Vale. Young Mauregard, after their first lunch together at the Carlton, seemed prepared to provide her with free meals and amusements for the rest of time. It is true he was madly in love with a Russian dancer, whose eccentric ways and abominable treatment of him formed the staple of the conversation which he poured into her very interested and compassionate ear. And, last, Bobbie Quinton gave her dancing lessons at the flat at the rate of a guinea apiece.
Christmas caused a break in these social activities. Lydia took her off to Brighton, where, meeting various acquaintances of her chaperone and making others of her own, she motored and danced and danced and motored, and in the pursuit of these delights discovered, with a fearful joy, that she could hold her own in the immemorial conflict of sex. Sydney Rooke, having driven down for the day, occasionally flashed through the hotel, the eternal smile of youth on his dark, lined face and his gestures unceasingly polite. As he passed, the heavens opened and rained champagne and boxes of chocolate and hot-house fruits and flowers and embroidered handbags, and once, a Pekinese dog for Lydia. Once again, an automobile seemed about to fall, but at Lydia’s protests it melted in the ether.
“A dog and a rose and a glass of wine,” said she, “are a woman’s due for amusing a man. But a motor-car is profiteering. Besides, it’s bound to drive you somewhere in the end—either to the flat of shame or the country house of married respectability: it only depends on who is at the wheel.”