As he drew up short and faced her, she looked like a deer surrounded by dogs. He was sorry, but this was no time for fooling. What stuff was this girl made of? Had she the gift of self-sacrifice as well as the magnetism of sex? Or was she just a female, who would cling to what she had won, self before everything?
Well, it was good to know that, but was that an answer? “Yes,” he said. “Well?” He would like to have added “But does he love you and can you keep him after passion is dead,—a man like Fallaray, who, after all, is forty.” But he hadn’t the courage or the desire to hurt.
“And because I love him he must go,” she said.
He leaned forward and seized her hand. He was surprised, delighted, and a little awed. She had gone as white as a lily. “You will see to that? You will use all your influence to give him back to us?” He could hardly believe his ears and his eyes.
“All my influence,” she said, standing very straight.
He bent down and touched her hand with his lips.
They were at the gate. They heard steps on the other side of the wall.
But before he went he bowed, as to a queen.
And then Lola heard the voice again, harshly. “Go on, de Brézé, go on. Don’t be weak. Stick to your guns. You have him in the palm of your hand.”
But she shook her head. “But I’m not de Brézé. I’ve only tried to be. I’m Lola Breezy of Queen’s Road, Bayswater, and this is love.”
She opened the gate and went in to Fallaray.
There was a hooligan knock on Georgie Malwood’s bedroom door.
Saying “Aubrey” to herself without any sign either of irritation or petulance, she put down her book, gathered herself together, and slid off the bed. In a suit of boy’s pajamas she looked as young and undeveloped as when, at seventeen, she had married Clayburgh in the first week of the War. Her bobbed hair went into points over her ears like horns, and added to her juvenile appearance. She might have been a schoolgirl peeping at life through the keyhole, instead of a woman of twenty-four, older than Methuselah.
She unlocked the door. “Barge in,” she said, standing clear.
And Aubrey Malwood, with his six foot two of brawn and muscle, his yellow Viking hair, eyebrows and moustache, barged, as he always did.
“I’ve just dropped in to tell you,” he said, going straight to the looking-glass, “that Feo rang up an hour ago. She wants you to lunch with her in Dover Street.”