“I see,” said Olivia. But she didn’t. Sydney Rooke was a mystery; and Lydia’s attitude towards him was more than her inexperience could understand.
Still, there she was in the pleasant galley and she did not question what she was doing in it. In a dim way she regarded it as the inevitable rescue vessel after universal shipwreck. Her eyes were blinded by its glitter and her ears deafened by its music to the welter of the unsalved world.
Just before New Year she received a letter from Bobby Quinton. It began: “Dearest of Ladies.” Never before having been thus apostrophized, she thought it peculiarly graceful and original. The writing was refined and exquisitely clear. To his dearest of ladies the young man bewailed her absence; life was dreary without her friendship and encouragement; all this Christmastide he was the loneliest thing on earth; he suggested that there was no one to love him—no mother or sisters to whom he could apply for comfort; this terrible night life to which he, poor demobilized soldier of fortune, was condemned in order to earn his bread, weighed upon his spirits and affected his health; he envied his dearest of ladies’ sojourn by the invigorating sea; he longed for the taste of it; but such health-restoring rapture he gave her, in the most delicate way, to understand, was for fairy princesses and not for the impecunious demobbed; he counted the days till her return and prayed her to bring back a whiff of ozone on her garments to revive the ever faithful one who had the temerity to try to teach her to dance.
A most piteous epistle. Bobby Quinton, by his ingratiating ways and his deference and his wit, had effaced her original conception of the type of young men who danced at night clubs for their living. She liked him. He seemed so young and she, through her long companionship with sorrow, so old in comparison; he seemed so foolish and impossible, and she so wise; to her, remembering the helpless dependence of her father and brothers, he seemed (motherless and sisterless as he was) lost in a hostile world. Besides, he was not a nameless adventurer. His father (long since deceased) had been a Colonial Governor. He had been to one of the great public schools. In short, he had the birth and breeding of a gentleman. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went with the letter to Lydia, full of maternal purpose.
It was nine o’clock in the morning. Their rooms had a communicating door. She found Lydia daintily attired in boudoir cap and dressing-jacket, having breakfast in bed.
“The poor boy’s dying for a breath of sea air. It would do him an enormous amount of good. Do you think we—of course, it really would be me—but it would be better if it appeared to be a joint affair—do you think we could, without offending him, ask him to come down here for a couple of days as our guest?”
Lydia, who had read the letter with a smile round her lips, replied drily:
“As far as Bobby is concerned—I really think we could.”
“And as far as we are concerned,” flashed Olivia, “why should the silly fact of being a woman prevent us from helping a lame dog over a stile?”
“A he-dog,” said Lydia.