Prologue

       Table of Contents

      “Tell me something about the Lextons, Mary. Where did you pick them up?” asked Lady Flora Desmond of her hostess, Mrs. Hampton. “As I looked at Mrs. Lexton during dinner, I thought I had never seen a prettier face. When I was a child, your little friend would have been what people then called a professional beauty.”

      “She certainly is very pretty, and a regular honey-pot! Look at her now, with Miles Rushworth?”

      The speaker nodded towards the wide-open French window of the high-ceilinged, oval eighteenth-century sitting-room. She and two other women were sitting there together after dinner, on the Saturday evening of what Mrs. Hampton thought promised to be a very successful week-end party.

      The window gave access to a broad stone terrace. Beyond the terrace lay a wide lawn, bathed in bright moonlight, and across the lawn sauntered very slowly two figures, that of a tall man, and that of a slender woman dressed in a light-coloured frock. They were moving away from the beautiful old country-house where they were both staying as guests, making for an avenue of beeches.

      Mary Hampton went on, speaking not unkindly, but with a certain tartness: “He took her out in his motor after tea, so she might have left him alone after dinner.”

      “You oughtn’t to complain, my dear! You told me this morning that you had asked the Lextons this week-end so that they could make friends with your millionaire,” observed Joan Rodney.

      She was a sharp-tongued, clever spinster who enjoyed putting her friends right, and telling them home truths. Much was forgiven to Miss Rodney because she was, if sharp-tongued, fundamentally kind-hearted.

      “My millionaire, as you call him, is one of the finest amateur billiard-players in England. I made Jack get hold of the best of the young ‘pros.’ He could only spare us this evening, and now that all the men, and two of the women, are either playing or watching the play in the billiard-room, Miles is philandering with Ivy Lexton in the garden!”

      “Not philandering, Mary,” observed Lady Flora, smiling. “Mr. Rushworth never philanders.”

      “Well! You know what I mean. It’s my fault, of course. I ought to have known that no party would be big enough to hold Ivy Lexton and another attraction. Last time she was here she snatched such a nice boy from his best girl, and stopped, I’m afraid, a proposal.”

      Lady Flora looked sorry. A plain woman herself, she admired, without a touch of envy, physical beauty more than she admired anything else in the world.

      “I don’t suppose Mrs. Lexton can help attracting men. It’s human nature after all——”

      Quoted Joan Rodney, with a sharp edge to her voice:

      “It’s human nature but, if so, oh!

       Isn’t human nature low?”

      “Little Ivy isn’t exactly low; at least I hope not,” observed little Ivy’s hostess reflectively. “But I do feel that there’s a curiously soulless quality about her. Though she’s not what people call clever, there’s something baffling about Ivy Lexton. I liked her much better when I first knew her.”

      “She mayn’t be what silly people call clever, but she’s plenty of what used to be called ‘nous,’” said Miss Rodney drily. “She engineered her stroll with Mr. Rushworth very cleverly to-night. Your husband was determined to get him into the billiard-room——”

      “She had a good excuse for that, Joan. As I told you yesterday, Jervis Lexton has been looking out for something to do for a long while.”

      Mrs. Hampton turned to her other friend. “It suddenly occurred to me, Flora, that Miles Rushworth, who must have many jobs in his gift, might find Jervis Lexton something to do. Ivy knows that I asked them both for this week-end on purpose that they might meet him. It isn’t easy to get hold of him for this kind of party.”

      “Have you known the Lextons long, Mary?” asked Lady Flora.

      She felt genuinely interested in Mrs. Jervis Lexton. The quiet, old-fashioned, some would have said very limited, middle-aged widow, and lovely, restless, self-absorbed, and very modern Ivy Lexton, had “made friends.”

      “I have known Jervis ever since he was born. His father was a friend of my father’s. But I had not seen him for years till I ran across him, in town, about three months ago. The last time I had seen him was early in the war, when his father had just died, and he had been given a fortnight’s leave. He’s what Jack calls quite a good sort; but it’s bad for a young man to become his own master at twenty. He seems to have married this lovely little thing when he was twenty-two. That’s six years ago.”

      “They seem to get on very well,” observed Lady Flora.

      “I think they do, though I’m afraid they’ve muddled away most of his money in having what Ivy considers a good time. He must have come into a fair fortune, for his father had sold their place just before the war.”

      “What fools young people seem to be today—I mean compared to the old days!” exclaimed Joan Rodney harshly.

      She went on: “John Oram—you know, Mary, the big solicitor—once told me that of ten men who sell their land at any given time, only two have anything of the purchase-price left at the end of ten years.”

      “Jervis Lexton won’t be one of those two men,” said his hostess regretfully. “Ivy told me today that they’re fearfully hard up.”

      “People often say that when it is laughably untrue! It’s the fashion to pretend one’s poor. Mrs. Lexton dresses beautifully. She must spend a great deal of money on her clothes,” interjected Joan Rodney.

      “I’m afraid there was no pretence about what Ivy told me this morning. She looked really worried, poor little thing! I do hope she will get something good for Jervis out of Miles Rushworth.”

      “She makes most of her frocks herself; it’s so easy nowadays,” said Lady Flora. And then she added: “She was telling me today about her girlhood. Her father failed in business, through no fault of his own, and for a little while she was on the stage——”

      “Only a walking-on part in a musical comedy,” observed Joan Rodney, “if what her husband, who strikes me as an honest young fellow, told me is true. However, I’m surprised, even so, that she didn’t do better for herself in what I have heard described as the straight road to the peeresses’ gallery, to say nothing of ‘another place.’”

      “Joan! Joan!” cried Mrs. Hampton deprecatingly.

      Miss Rodney got up and came across to where her hostess sat under a heavily-shaded lamp.

      She put her left elbow on the marble mantelpiece, and looking down into the other’s now upturned face, “I don’t like your little friend,” she said deliberately. “I’ve been studying her closely ever since she arrived on Thursday afternoon, though she didn’t seem aware of my existence till after lunch today. When I was in America last year, they’d invented a name for that sort of young woman. She’s out, all the time, for what she can get. ‘A gold-digger’—that’s the slang American term for that kind of young person, Mary. I know what I’m talking about.”

      “How can you possibly know?”

      “By instinct, my dear! If I were you I should give pretty Mrs. Lexton a very wide berth.”

      And then, rather to the relief of the other two, she exclaimed,