"Since she came back she"s been helping my sister and me with a scheme of ours," said Lady John.
"She certainly knows how to juggle money out of the men!" admitted Mrs.
Heriot.
"It would sound less equivocal, Lydia, if you added that the money is to build baths in our Shelter for Homeless Women."
"Homeless women?" echoed Mr. Freddy.
"Yes; in the most insanitary part of Soho."
"Oh--a--really." Mr. Freddy stroked his smart little moustache.
"It doesn"t sound quite in Miss Levering"s line," Farnborough hazarded.
"My dear boy," said his hostess, "you know as little about what"s in a woman"s line as most men."
"Oh, I say!" Mr. Freddy looked round with a laugh.
Lord John threw out his chest and dangled his eyegla.s.s with an indulgent air.
"Philanthropy," he said, "in a woman like Miss Levering, is a form of restlessness. But she"s a _nice_ creature. All she needs is to get some "nice" fella to marry her!"
Mrs. Freddy laughingly hooked herself on her husband"s arm.
"Yes; a woman needs a balance wheel, if only to keep her from flying back to town on a hot day like this."
"Who," demanded the host, "is proposing anything so----"
"The Elusive One," said Mrs. Freddy.
"Not Miss----"
"Yes; before luncheon."
d.i.c.k Farnborough glanced quickly at the clock, and then his eyes went questing up the great staircase. Lady John had met the chorus of disapproval with--
"She must be in London by three, she says."
Lord John stared. "_To-day?_ Why she only came late last night! What must she go back for, in the name of----"
"Well, _that_ I didn"t ask her. But it must be something important, or she would stay and talk over the plans for the new Shelter."
Farnborough had pulled out his cigarette case and stepped out through the window into the garden. But he went not as one who means to take a stroll and enjoy a smoke, rather as a man on a mission.
A few minutes after, the desultory conversation in the hall was arrested by the sound of voices near the windows.
They were in full view now--Vida Levering, hatless, a cool figure in pearl-grey with a red umbrella; St. John Greatorex, wearing a Panama hat, talking and gesticulating with a small book, in which his fingers still kept the place; Farnborough, a little supercilious, looking on.
"I protest! Good Lord! what are the women of this country coming to? I _protest_ against Miss Levering being carried indoors to discuss anything so revolting."
As Lord John moved towards the window the vermilion disk of the umbrella closed and dropped like a poppy before it blooms. As the owner of it entered the hall, Greatorex followed in her wake, calling out--
"Bless my soul! what can a woman like you _know_ about such a thing?"
"Little enough," said Miss Levering, smiling and scattering good-mornings.
"I should think so indeed!" He breathed a sigh of relief and recovered his waggishness. "It"s all this fellow Farnborough"s wicked jealousy--routing us out of the summer-house where we were sitting, _perfectly_ happy--weren"t we?"
"Ideally," said the lady.
"There. You hear!"
He interrupted Lord John"s inquiry as to the seriousness of Miss Levering"s unpopular and mysterious programme for the afternoon. But the lady quietly confirmed it, and looked over her hostess"s shoulder at the plan-sheet that Lady John was silently holding out between two extended hands.
"Haled indoors on a day like this"--Greatorex affected a mighty scorn of the doc.u.ment--"to talk about--Public Sanitation, forsooth! Why, G.o.d bless my soul, do you realize that"s _drains_!"
"I"m dreadfully afraid it is," said Miss Levering, smiling down at the architectural drawing.
"And we in the act of discussing Italian literature!" Greatorex held out the little book with an air of comic despair. "Perhaps you"ll tell me that isn"t a more savoury topic for a lady."
"But for the tramp population less conducive to savouriness--don"t you think--than baths?" She took the book from him, shutting her handkerchief in the place where his finger had been.
"No, no"--Greatorex, Panama in hand, was shaking his piebald head--"I can"t understand this morbid interest in vagrants. You"re too--much too---- Leave it to others!"
"What others?"
"Oh, the sort of woman who smells of india-rubber," he said, with smiling impertinence. "The typical English spinster. You"ve seen her.
Italy"s full of her. She never goes anywhere without a mackintosh and a collapsible bath--_rubber_. When you look at her it"s borne in upon you that she doesn"t only smell of rubber. She is rubber, too."
They all laughed.
"Now you frivolous people go away," Lady John said. "We"ve only got a few minutes to talk over the terms of the late Mr. Barlow"s munificence before the carriage comes for Miss Levering."
In the midst of the general movement to the garden, Mrs. Freddy asked Farnborough did he know she"d got that old horror to give Lady John 8000 for her charity before he died?
"Who got him to?" demanded Greatorex.
"Miss Levering," answered Lady John. "He wouldn"t do it for me, but she brought him round."
"Bah-ee Jove!" said Freddy. "I expect so."
"Yes." Mrs. Freddy beamed in turn at her lord and at Farnborough as she strolled with them through the window. "_Isn"t_ she wonderful?"
"Too wonderful," said Greatorex to the lady in question, lowering his voice, "to waste your time on the wrong people."
"I shall waste less of my time after this." Miss Levering spoke thoughtfully.
"I"m relieved to hear it. I can"t see you wheedling money for shelters and rot of that sort out of retired grocers."