After about a week of this, she suddenly lighted upon exactly what she had been looking for in the books of the house-agents. A certain new big house in Grosvenor Street, which externally recalled a fortress made of stout sand-bags was to be let by Lord Newgate (marquis of), the eldest son of the Duke of Bailey. Sarah had already seen Lady Newgate, a tall, floating dream of blue eyes, golden hair and child-like mouth, at the opera, and knew her and her husband to be among the true white nightingales who sing and play poker at the very top of the tree she was pining to climb. A less Napoleonic climber than she might have thought that to take the Newgates’ house was a passport to London, but she knew that it would only carry its cachet among the people who could not really be of any use to her, namely, that well-dressed esurient gang of Londoners who find it quite sufficient to be fed and amused at other people’s expense. Sensible woman that she was, she fully intended to feed and amuse them, but it was not they that she was out for: at the best they were like the stage army which marches in at one door and out at another, and in and out again. They were not the principals. You were, of course, surrounded by people whom you fed and amused, if you were on the climb, just as you were surrounded by footmen and motor-cars, but she looked much further than this. She argued, again correctly, that if such conspicuously melodious songsters as the Newgates wanted to let their house during the very months when they would naturally be needing it most, they must be in considerable want of money, and would be likely to give some valuable equivalent for it. So, seeing her scheme complete from end to end, as far as the taking of this house was concerned, she told the slightly astonished agent that she was willing to take the house for the next three months or the next six at the price named, but that she wished to make her arrangements with Lady Newgate herself. The agent, seeing that she was just a wild American, politely represented to her that this was not the usual method of doing such business in civilized places, but she remained adamant.
‘If I don’t settle it up with the Marchioness of Newgate,’ she said, ‘I won’t settle it up with anybody else. Kindly give that message over your ’phone, please, to the Marchioness, and say that if she feels disposed to entertain my proposals, I shall be very happy to see her at the Ritz Hotel this afternoon. And if she don’t care to come, why, I don’t care to take her old house. That’s all. You may say that my name is Mrs. Whitehand, and that my husband’s the head of the firm, which she maybe has heard of.’