“What does it matter?” Olivia asked stoutly.
Lydia laughed in her half-cynical, tolerant way.
“Do as you like, dear. I don’t mind. You’re out for experience, not I. I’d only have you remark that our he-dog friend Bobby is sitting up and begging for the invitation——”
“Oh! Ah!” cried Olivia, with a fling of her arm, “you’re horrid!”
“Not a bit,” smiled Lydia. “I face facts, as you’ll have to do, if you want to find comfort in this matter-of-fact world. Have your Bobby down by all means. Only keep your eye on him.”
“He’s not my Bobby,” said Olivia indignantly.
“Our Bobby, then,” said Lydia, with good-natured indulgence.
So Olivia, with the little palpitation of the heart attendant on consciousness of adventurous and (in Medlow eyes, preposterous) well-doing, wrote to Bobby Quinton a letter whose gracious delicacy would not have wounded the susceptibilities of a needy Hidalgo or an impoverished Highland chieftain, and received in reply a telegram of eager acceptance.
Bobby appeared immaculately vestured, his heart overflowing with gratitude at the amazing sweetness of his two dear ladies. Never had man been blessed with such fairy godmothers. By the fresh frankness of his appreciation of their hospitality he disarmed criticism. A younger son hanging on to the court of Louis XIII never received purses of gold from his lady love with less embarrassed grace. He devoted himself to their service. He had the art of tactful effacement, and of appearance at the exact moment of welcome. He enlivened their meals with chatter and a boyish brightness that passed for wit.
To Olivia, the dearest of his dear ladies, he confided the pathetic history of his life. A sunny, sheltered corner of the Pier, both sitting side by side well wrapped in furs, conduced to intimacy. How a young man in such a precarious financial position could afford to wear a fur-lined coat with a new astrachan collar it did not strike Olivia to enquire. That he, like herself, was warm on that sun-filled morning, with the sea dancing and sparkling away beyond them, and human types around them exuding the prosperity of peace, seemed sufficient for the comfortable hour. He spoke of his early years of ease, of his modest patrimony coming to an end soon after the war broke out; of his commission in a yeomanry regiment; of his heart-break as the months went on and the chance of the regiment being sent to the front grew less and less; of his exchange into a regiment of the line; of the rotten heart that gave out after a month in France; of his grief at being invalided out of the army and his struggles and anxieties when he returned to civil life, branded as physically unfit. He had tried the stage, musical comedy, male youth in the manless chorus being eagerly welcomed; then, after a little training, he found he had the dancer’s gift. “So one thing led to another,” said he, “and that’s my history.”