“What story?” asked Lady Flora. Her host’s rather sly sense of humour had never appealed to her, though they were quite good friends.
“The story of the lady who said to her husband, ‘Oh, do let’s go and see them; they’re so rich!’ to be met with the answer, ‘My dear, I would if it was catching!’ ”
Lady Flora looked a little puzzled. “He was quite right. Money is not catching, though I suppose most people wish it were.”
“A great many people are convinced that it is, Flora, and our little Ivy is among them. I’m sure she feels that if she rubs herself up against it close enough, a little will certainly come off. And I’m not sure, in her case, that she’s not right!”
But Lady Flora could be obstinate in her mild way.
“I like Mrs. Lexton,” she said gently. “I’m going to call on her when we’re all in town again. She’s promised to take me to a nice quiet night club. I’ve always longed to see one. I want my sister-in-law, I mean Jenny, to know her. Jenny loves young people. She gives amusing little dances—”
“I think you’ll make a mistake if you introduce Ivy to the Duchess.”
“I don’t see why, my dear? After all, Mary, your little friend has been very sweet to me, and that though she knows I’m really poor.”
The other woman gave a quick look at her friend. Sometimes she thought Flora Desmond too good, too simple, even for human nature’s daily food.
I
The July sun shone slantwise into the ugly, almost sordid-looking bedroom where Ivy Lexton, still only half dressed, had just begun making up her lovely face in front of a tarnished, dust-powdered toilet-glass.
It was nine o’clock in the morning; an hour ago she had had her cup of tea and—mindful of her figure—the hard biscuit which was the only thing she allowed herself by way of breakfast. Her husband, hopelessly idle, easy-natured, well-bred Jervis Lexton, was still fast asleep in the little back bedroom his wife called his dressing-room, but which was their box-room and general “glory-hole.”
Everything that had been of any real value there had gradually disappeared in the last few weeks, for Ivy and Jervis Lexton, to use their own rueful expression, were indeed stony-broke.
Yet they had started their married life, six years before, with a capital of sixty-eight thousand pounds. Now they were almost penniless. Indeed, what Ivy called to herself with greater truth than was usual “her little all,” that is, a pound note, and twelve shillings and sixpence in silver, lay on the stained, discoloured mahogany dressing-table before which she was now standing.
How amazed would her still large circle of friends and acquaintances have been had they learnt how desperate and how hopeless was her own and her husband’s financial position. Yesterday she had even tried to sell two charming frocks brought back for her by a good-natured friend from Paris. But she had only been offered a few shillings for the two, so she had brought them home again.
And now, as her eyes fell on the pound note and tiny heap of silver, they filled with angry tears. How she loathed these sordid, hateful lodgings! What a terrible, even a terrifying thing, it was to have fallen so low as to have to live here, in two shabby, ill-kept bedrooms, where there wasn’t even a hanging cupboard for her pretty clothes, and where the drawers of the painted deal chest of drawers would neither shut nor open.
The Lextons had come there for two reasons. One, a stupid reason, because their landlady was the widow of a man who had been employed as a lad in the stables of Jervis Lexton’s father. A better reason was that, owing to there being no bathroom in the house, the rooms were amazingly, fantastically cheap. The Lextons had already been camping here, as Ivy’s husband put it, for some months, but they rarely gave any of their friends their address. Jervis still belonged to a famous club to which some of his rich men acquaintances would have given much to belong; and Ivy had a guinea subscription to a small bridge club from which her letters were forwarded each day.
There came a knock at the bedroom door. It was a funny, fumbling knock, and she knew it for that of the landlady’s little boy.
Flinging a pale pink lace-trimmed wrapper round her, “Come in,” she called out sharply.
The child came in, holding in his grubby hand two letters.
She took them from him, and quickly glanced at the envelopes. The one, inscribed in a firm masculine handwriting to her present, Pimlico, address, she put down on the dressing-table unopened. She knew, or thought she knew, so well what it contained.
There had been a time, not so very long ago, when Ivy Lexton’s beautiful eyes would have shone at the sight of that handwriting. A time when she would have torn that envelope open at once, so that her senses could absorb with delight the ardent protestations of love written on the large plain sheet of paper that envelope contained.
But she no longer felt “like that” towards her daily correspondent, Roger Gretorex. Also she was going to see him this morning in the hope, nay, the certainty, that he would help to tide over this horrid moment of difficulty, by giving her whatever money he could put his hands on.
Gretorex was of a very different stamp from the men who had up to now fallen in love with her. He worshipped her with all his heart and soul, while yet conscious that he was now doing what, before he had been tempted, he would have unhesitatingly condemned in another man. As to that, and other matters of less moment, he was what Ivy Lexton felt to be ludicrously old-fashioned, and she had soon become weary of him, and satiated with the jealous devotion he lavished on her.
Also, Roger Gretorex was poor; not poor as Ivy’s
