Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/230

 "You are quite sure? Last time—you know—I found Lady Truget in possession. And I have a little party."

From the club she drove to Gaiter's in Regent Street and bought flowers, roses, luscious but conventional red and white roses with plenty of perfume. None of your too exotic flowers for a very serious minded boy. She called at Fuller's and purchased chocolates. She descended at her modiste's, not because she wanted a dress, but because she was feeling well, and it was a pleasant thing to do. "Melanie's" mirrors were kinder than most mirrors; they made you look less of a fright than you feared you might be.

Then, she told Randal to drive her round the park. She lay back comfortably to consider her preparations. She decided that it had been rather subtle of her to ask two charming girls to meet and amuse Christopher, and she included them in the furnishings and drapings of her temple of Venus. She thought that if she meant to get at the boy she would get at him most successfully through sex, not crudely, but by way of the pleasant emanations of sex, by suggesting to him what a good time she could give him.

As for the two girls,—O,—well—they were very modern. Lola Merrindin's vivacity might suffice for a week-end in somebody's bungalow on the river. Fluffy Tarrant was like a pot of marmalade, but she was as hard as the pot.

"I wonder if the boy has arrived? And what has Steve's attitude been? Not liking it much!"

Christopher had arrived. He was's tanding with his hands in his pockets in the middle of his mother's drawing-room, looking at the photo of the double-chinned captain of industry who had been Duggan. Kit's mother had thought it a nice touch,—this putting out of the family photographs.

Christopher did not like the face of the dead Duggan.

His impressions of this opulent room in an opulent house were peculiarly vivid, perhaps because this was the first occasion upon which he had experienced the gilding of the lily. His modernity had a clean temper, like the knife which he was to use so skilfully in after years. So this was where