Lady Cheyne,—that kindly soul who was never so happy as when giving a hand to a stray dog. It might easily happen, the weather being so good, that she had already left town. That would be wonderful. But if not, if she were still busy with her musicians and their concerts, then she must be seen and influenced to leave town, or, better still, called up on the telephone at once. A tired little woman of the world needed a breath of fresh air and the peace of a country garden. Would Lady Cheyne take mercy on her, as she took mercy on so many people, and give her this peace and this quietude?—Yes, that was the way. It was a brain wave.
Filled with determination no longer to wait for an opportunity, but to make one, not to rely on fate, as she had been doing, but to treat fate as though it were something alive, a man—Simpkins, Treadwell or Chalfont—and cajole him, Lola proceeded to dress, with the blood tingling in her veins, and imbued with the feeling of one who faces a forlorn hope. But it was still too early to use the telephone to the elderly lady who, if she were in town, had probably listened to music into the small hours. She must wait and go on thinking. There were other things to overcome, even if this one came right. How to wheedle a holiday; to hint, if she dared, at her lack of clothes, a suit-case, shoes.
The servants’ sitting room was empty. On Sunday, the ménage, except for the cook, slept late. And so Lola marked time impatiently, achieving breakfast from the sulky woman by flattery. Lady Feo had given out that she was not to be disturbed until her bell rang. She would wake to find Sunday in London,—a detestable idea. There was nothing for which to get up.
Watching a clock that teased her with its sloth, Lola went over and over the sort of thing to say to Lady Cheyne, disturbed in her current of thought by the suddenly garrulous cook who insisted on telling the whole story of her life, during the course of which she had buried a drunkard and married a bigamist and lost her savings and acquired asthma,—a dramatic career, even for a cook. But at nine-thirty, unable to control herself any longer, she ran upstairs to Feo’s alarming den, hunted out Lady Cheyne’s number in the book and eventually got into communication with an operator who might, from her autocratic manner, very easily have been Mrs. Trotsky, or the wife of a labor leader, or a coal-miner’s daughter, or indeed a telephone operator of the most approved type.