So they laughed and discussed the profiteers and walked back to the hotel for lunch with the sharpened appetites of twenty.
When Bobby Quinton left them, Olivia reproached herself for lack of sympathy. The boy had done his best. A rotten, and crocky heart, who was she to despise? But for circumstance he might have done heroic things. Perhaps in his defiance of physical disability he was doing a heroic thing even now. Still. . . . To Lydia, in an ironically teasing mood, she declared:
“When I do fall in love, it’s not going to be with any one like Bobby Quinton. I want a man—there would be a devil of a row, of course, if he tried—but one capable of beating me.”
“Bobby would do that, right enough, if you gave him the chance,” said Lydia.
Olivia reflected for a while. “Why have you got your knife into him like that?” she asked abruptly.
“I haven’t, my dear child. If I had, do you think I would have allowed him to come down? I live and let live. By letting live, I live very comfortably and manage, with moderate means, to have a very good time.”
Olivia, already dressed for dinner, looked down on the easy, creamy, handsome, kimono-clad woman, curled up like a vast Angora cat on the hotel bedroom sofa, and once more was dimly conscious of a doubt whether the galley of Lydia Dawlish was the one for her mother’s daughter to row in.
Still, vogue la galère. When she returned to London there was little else to do. Eating and dancing filled many of her days and nights. She tried to recapture the pleasure of books which had been all her recreation for years; but, although her life was not a continuous whirl of engagements—for it requires a greater vogue as a pretty and unattached young woman than Olivia possessed to be booked for fourteen meals and seven evenings every week of the year—she found little time for solitary intelligent occupation. If she was at a loose end, Lydia’s hat shop provided an agreeable pastime. Or, as a thousand little odds and ends of dress demanded attention, there was always a sensuous hour or two to be spent at Pacotille’s and Luquin’s or Deville’s. Tea companions seldom failed. When she had no evening engagements she was glad to get to bed, soon after the dinner in the downstairs restaurant, and to sleep the sleep of untroubled youth. And all the time the spell of London still held her captive. To walk the crowded streets, to join the feminine crush before the plate-glass windows of great shops, to watch the strange birds in the ornamental water in St. James’s Park, to wander about the Abbey and the Temple Gardens, to enter on the moment’s impulse a Bond Street picture gallery or a cinema—all was a matter of young joy and thrill. She even spent a reckless and rapturous afternoon at Madame Tussaud’s. Sometimes Janet Philimore accompanied her on these excursions round the monuments of London. Janet, who had mild antiquarian tastes and a proletarian knowledge of London traffic, took her by tubes and buses to the old City churches and the Tower, and exhibited to her wondering gaze the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange and Guildhall up the narrow street. For sentimental interest, there was always Bobby Quinton, who continued to maintain himself under her maternal eye. And so the new life went on.
It was one night in April, while she was standing under the porch of a theatre, Mouregard, her escort, having gone in search of his dinner-and-theatre brougham—for those were days when taxis were scarce and drivers haughty—that she found herself addressed by a long-nosed, one-armed man, who raised his hat.
“Miss Gale—I’m sure you don’t remember me.”