Her clothes were incomparable, with just that suggestion of the haphazard which raised them high above the mere chic of the mannequin.
Her character was a lovely harmony of contending virtues—she was witty and tender hearted; passionate and serene, sensual and temperate, impulsive and discreet.
Her set, the most intimate and brilliant in Europe, achieved a superb mean between those two poles of savagery Lady Circumference and Lady Metroland.
Soon Imogen Quest became a byword for social inaccessibility—the final goal for all climbers.
Adam went one day to a shop in Hanover Square to watch Nina buy some hats and was seriously incommoded by the heaps of bandboxes disposed on the chairs and dressing-tables ostentatiously addressed to Mrs. Andrew Quest. He could hear her name spoken reverently in cocktail clubs, and casually let slip in such phrases as “My dear, I never see Peter now. He spends all his time with Imogen Quest,” or “As Imogen would say …” or “I think the Quests have got one like that. I must ask them where it came from.” And this knowledge on the intangible Quest set, moving among them in uncontrolled dignity of life, seemed to leaven and sweeten the lives of Mr. Chatterbox’s readers.
One day Imogen gave a party, the preparations for which occupied several paragraphs. On the following day Adam found his table deep in letters of complaint from gatecrashers who had found the house in Seamore Place untenanted.
Finally a message came down that Lord Monomark was interested in Mrs. Quest; could Mr. Chatterbox arrange a meeting. That day the Quests sailed for Jamaica.
Adam also attempted in an unobtrusive way to exercise some influence over the clothes of his readers. “I noticed at the Café de la Paix yesterday evening
,” he wrote, “that two of the smartest men in the room were wearing black suède shoes with their evening clothes—one of them, who shall be nameless, was a Very Important Person indeed. I hear that this fashion, which comes, like so many others, from New York, is likely to become popular over here this season.
” A few days later he mentioned Captain Stuart-Kerr’s appearance at the Embassy “wearing, of course, the ultra-fashionable black suède shoes
.” In a week he was gratified to notice that Johnny Hoop and Archie Schwert had both followed Captain Stuart-Kerr’s lead, while in a fortnight the big emporiums of ready-made clothes in Regent Street had transposed their tickets in the windows and arranged rows of black suède shoes on a silver step labelled “For evening wear.”
His attempt to introduce a bottle-green bowler hat, however, was not successful; in fact, a “well-known St. James’s Street hatter,” when interviewed by an evening paper on the subject, said that he had never seen or heard of such a thing, and though he would not refuse to construct one if requested to by an old customer, he was of the opinion that no old customer of his would require a hat of that kind (though there was a sad case of an impoverished old beau who attempted to stain a grey hat with green ink, as once in years gone by he had been used to dye the carnation for his buttonhole).
As the days passed, Mr. Chatterbox’s page became almost wholly misleading. With sultanesque caprice Adam would tell his readers of inaccessible eating-houses which were now the centre of fashion; he drove them to dance in temperance hotels in Bloomsbury. In a paragraph headed “Montparnasse in Belgravia,” he announced that the buffet at Sloane Square tube station had become the haunt of the most modern artistic coterie (Mr. Benfleet hurried there on his first free evening, but saw no one but Mrs. Hoop and Lord Vanburgh and a plebeian topper with a celluloid collar).
As a last resort, on those hopeless afternoons when invention failed and that black misanthropy settled on him which waits alike on gossip writer and novelist, Adam sometimes found consolation in seizing upon some gentle and self-effacing citizen and transfiguring him with a blaze of notoriety.
He did this with a man called Ginger.
As part of his duties, which led him into many unusual places, Adam and Nina went up to Manchester for the November Handicap. Here they had the disheartening experience of seeing Indian Runner come in an easy winner and the totalisator paying out thirty-five to one. It was during the bottle-green bowler campaign, and Adam was searching in vain for any sign of his influence when, suddenly, among the crowd, he saw the genial red face of the drunk Major to whom he had entrusted his thousand pounds at Lottie’s. It seemed odd that a man so bulky could be so elusive. Adam was not sure whether the Major saw him, but in some mysterious way Adam’s pursuit coincided with the Major’s complete disappearance. The crowd became very dense, brandishing flasks and sandwiches. When Adam reached the spot where the Major had stood he found two policemen arresting a pickpocket.
“ ’Ere, who are you pushing?” asked the spectators.
“Have you
