Elma was nothing else than a modern girl—a “latchkey girl,” if one liked to apply to her such an epithet. The removal of the conventions which tradition had built up around women—removed by the ardours and endurances of the war—has reorganised society. The correct behaviour of the days of Elma’s mother had vanished, and instead of the chaperon—to-day as extinct as the dodo—Elma frequently took around with her her dancing partner, a good-looking young barrister named Mostyn Wynn, with whom she often danced the entire evening, he taking her home to Park Lane in the small hours of the morning. Mostyn was only a “pal.” He was a divine dancer, but she regarded him in much the same light as she regarded her little sharp-nosed, alert Pomeranian, Tweedles, the fiery yapper who had been the means of introducing her to Roddy Homfray.
There are a good many pessimists to-day, both men and women, in London Society who declare that its “decline and fall” has come because a girl has a latchkey, because she sometimes pays for a man’s dinner at a restaurant, and because she takes her dancing partner about with her like a dog. They say that the delicate lights and shades of the romance of Society of the Edwardian days are no longer to be found in Mayfair or Belgravia, but those who see through modern spectacles know that the removal of those tiresome and outworn conventions was inevitable, and that dancing partners and latchkeys for women mark the renaissance of London life, rather than the decline which our pessimists who have lived in the last generation declare it to be.
“Last Wednesday you were not in London, were you?” remarked Roddy, as he smoked the cigarette which Elma had offered him.
“No,” she replied. “I motored father up to Liverpool. He had some business friends coming from New York, so we didn’t give our usual party.”
“But on the previous Wednesday you did, and you had among your guests a Mrs Crisp.”
“Yes, Freda Crisp. Do you know her? Isn’t she awfully jolly?”
“I only know her by sight, Elma. What do you know of her? Tell me,” he asked, lowering his voice again.
“Oh! not really very much. Her friend, Mr Bertram Harrison, is a business friend of father’s. They are, I believe, carrying on some negotiations concerning a company in Marseilles.”
“But Mrs Crisp. How did you come to know her?”
“Why?”