“It’s all ready for you,” said Patsy.
“I’ve put in half a bottle of bath salts.”
They treated him as though he had just come back from the North Pole after a journey of incredible hardship.
It warmed the cockles of his heart.
“Is it good to be home again?” asked his mother, her eyes tender with love.
“Grand.”
But when Leslie, partly dressed, went into his wife’s room to have a chat with her while she did her face, she turned to him with a somewhat anxious look.
“He’s looking awfully pale, Leslie,” she said.
“A bit washed out.
I noticed that myself.”
“His face is so drawn.
It struck me the moment he got out of the Pullman, but I couldn’t see very well till we got here.
And he’s as white as a ghost.”
“He’ll be all right in a day or two.
I expect he’s been racketing about a bit.
By the look of him I suspect he’s helped quite a number of pretty ladies to provide for their respectable old age.”
Mrs. Mason was sitting at her dressing-table, in a Chinese jacket trimmed with white fur, carefully doing her eye-brows, but now, the pencil in her hand, she suddenly turned round.
“What do you mean, Leslie?
You don’t mean to say you think he’s been having a lot of horrid foreign women.”
“Come off it, Venetia.
What d’you suppose he went to Paris for?”
“To see the pictures and Simon, and well, go to the Francais.
He’s only a boy.”
“Don’t be so silly, Venetia.
He’s twenty-three.
You don’t suppose he’s a virgin, do you?”
“I do think men are disgusting.”
Her voice broke, and Leslie, seeing she was really upset, put his hand kindly on her shoulder.
“Darling, you wouldn’t like your only son to be a eunuch, would you now?”
Mrs. Mason didn’t quite know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.
“I don’t suppose I would really,” she giggled.
It was with a sense of peculiar satisfaction that Charley, half an hour later, in his second-best dinner-jacket, seated himself with his father in a velvet coat, his mother in a tea-gown of mauve silk and Patsy maidenly in rose chiffon, at the Chippendale table.
The Georgian silver, the shaded candles, the lace doyleys which Mrs. Mason had bought in Florence, the cut glass—it was all pretty, but above all it was familiar.
The pictures on the walls, each with its own strip-lighting, were meritorious; and the two maids, in their neat brown uniforms, added a nice touch.
You had a feeling of security, and the world outside was comfortably distant.
The good, plain food was designed to satisfy a healthy appetite without being fattening.
In the hearth an electric fire very satisfactorily imitated burning logs.
Leslie Mason looked at the menu.
“I see we’ve killed the fatted calf for the prodigal son,” he said, with an arch look at his wife.
“Did you have any good food in Paris, Charley?” asked Mrs. Mason.
“All right.
I didn’t go to any of the smart restaurants, you know.
We used to have our meals at little places in the Quarter.”
“Oh. Who’s we?”
Charley hesitated an instant and flushed.
“I dined with Simon, you know.”
This was a fact.
His answer neatly concealed the truth without actually telling a lie.
Mrs. Mason was aware that her husband was giving her a meaning look, but she paid no attention to it; she continued to gaze on her son with tenderly affectionate eyes, and he was much too ingenuous to suspect that they were groping deep into his soul to discover whatever secrets he might be hiding there.
“And did you see any pictures?” she asked kindly.