For ten years she had never been outside the walls of the convent alone, and when she had lived in London as a girl, she could not remember ever having been out-of-doors by herself.
Violet, always driven everywhere in her own motor, and accustomed to Pamela's modern resourcefulness and independence, never took so childish an inability into serious consideration.
"Alex, dear, Barbara hoped you'd go down to her this afternoon. Will you do that, or come to Ranelagh? The only thing is, if you wouldn't mind going to Hampstead in a taxi? I shall have to use the Mercédès, and the little car is being cleaned."
"Of course, I shouldn't mind. I'll go to Barbara, I think."
"Just whichever you like best. And you'll be back early, won't you? because we're dining at seven, and you know how ridiculous Cedric is about punctuality and the servants, and all that sort of thing."
After Violet had gone, in all her soft, elaborate laces and flower-wreathed hat, Alex, with every instinct of her convent training set against the extravagance of a taxi, started out on foot, rejoicing that a sunny July day should give her the opportunity of enjoying Pamela's boasted delight, the top of an omnibus.
She took the wrong one, discovered her mistake too late, and spent most of the afternoon in bewilderedly retracing her own footsteps. Finally she found a taxi, and arrived at Downshire Hill very tired, and after five o'clock.
Barbara was shocked, as Alex had known she would be, at the taxi.
"Violet is so inconsiderate. Because she can afford taxis as a matter of course herself, she never thinks that other people can't. I know myself how every shilling mounts up. I'll see you into an omnibus when you go, Alex. It takes just under an hour, and you need only change once."
But that change took place at the junction of four roads, all of them seething with traffic.
And again Alex was hopelessly at sea, and boarded at last an omnibus that conveyed her swiftly in the wrong direction.
She was late for dinner, and when Cedric inquired, with his assumption of the householder whose domestic routine has been flung out of gear, what had delayed her, she stammered and said that Barbara had kept her--she hadn't let her start early enough--had mistaken the time.