“But it must have been exciting,” Olivia protested. “Yet——” she knitted her brow, “why the Lady Northborough barrage?”
“It’s his way,” said Lydia.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I would give him my answer to-night.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. He’s charming. He’s rolling in money—you remember the motor-car I turned down for obvious reasons—he knows all kinds of nice people—he’s fifty——”
“Fifty!” cried Olivia, aghast. To three and twenty fifty is senile.
“The widow’s ideal.”
“It’s exciting, but not romantic,” said Olivia.
“Romance perished on the eleventh of November, 1918. Since then it has been ‘Every woman for herself and the Devil take the hindmost.’ Are you aware that there are not half enough men to go round? So when a man with twenty thousand a year comes along, a woman has to think like—like——”