It's rather a good role, you see, I had to do something. There was I, proud and penniless like the heroine of a novelette, well born and badly educated.
'What to do, girl?
God wot,' saith she.
The poor relation type of girl, all willingness to do without a fire in her room and content to do odd jobs and 'help dear Cousin So-and-So,' I observed to be at a premium.
Nobody really wants her - except those people who can't keep their servants, and they treat her like a galley slave.
"So I became the court fool.
Insolence, plain speaking, a dash of wit now and again (not too much lest I should have to live up to it), and behind it all, a very shrewd observation of human nature.
People rather like being told how horrible they really are.
That's why they flock to popular preachers. It's been a great success.
I'm always overwhelmed with invitations.
I can live on my friends with the greatest ease, and I'm careful to make no pretence of gratitude."
"There's no one quite like you, Allegra.
You don't mind in the least what you say."
"That's where you're wrong.
I mind very much - I take care and thought about the matter.
My seeming outspokenness is always calculated.
I've got to be careful. This job has got to carry me on to old age."
"Why not marry? I know heaps of people have asked you."
Allegra's face grew suddenly hard. "I can never marry."
"Because -" Maisie left the sentence unfinished, looking at her friend. The latter gave a short nod of assent.
Footsteps were heard on the stairs. The butler threw open the door and announced:
"Mr. Segrave."
John came in without any particular enthusiasm.
He couldn't imagine why the old boy had asked him. If he could have got out of it he would have done so. The house depressed him, with its solid magnificence and the soft pile of its carpet.
A girl came forward and shook hands with him. He remembered vaguely having seen her one day in her father's office.
"How do you do, Mr. Segrave?
Mr. Segrave - Miss Kerr."
Then he woke. Who was she? Where did she come from?
From the flame-colored draperies that floated round her, to the tiny Mercury wings on her small Greek head, she was a being transitory and fugitive, standing out against the dull background with an effect of unreality.
Rudolph Wetterman came in, his broad expanse of gleaming shirtfront creaking as he walked. They went down informally to dinner.
Allegra Kerr talked to her host. John Segrave had to devote himself to Maisie. But his whole mind was on the girl on the other side of him.
She was marvelously effective. Her effectiveness was, he thought, more studied than natural. But behind all that, there lay something else.
Flickering fire, fitful, capricious, like the will-o'-the-wisps that of old lured men into the marshes.
At last he got a chance to speak to her. Maisie was giving her father a message from some friend she had met that day.
Now that the moment had come, he was tongue-tied.
His glance pleaded with her dumbly.
"Dinner-table topics," she said lightly.
"Shall we start with the theatres, or with one of those innumerable openings, beginning, 'Do you like -?'"
John laughed.
"And if we find we both like dogs and dislike sandy cats, it will form what is called a 'bond' between us?"
"Assuredly," said Allegra gravely.
"It is, I think, a pity to begin with a catechism."
"Yet it puts conversation within the reach of all." "True, but with disastrous results."
"It is useful to know the rules - if only to break them."
John smiled at her. "I take it, then, that you and I will indulge our personal vagaries.
Even though we display thereby the genius that is akin to madness."
With a sharp unguarded movement, the girl's hand swept a wineglass off the table. There was the tinkle of broken glass.
Maisie and her father stopped speaking.
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Wetterman. I'm throwing glasses on the floor." "My dear Allegra, it doesn't matter at all, not at all."
Beneath his breath John Segrave said quickly: