You might stand me a cocktail at Claridge's to fortify me, will you?'
'At what time?' he asked.
'One.'
'All right.
I'll meet you there.'
He was waiting for her when she came in.
She walked with a sort of spring as though her eager feet itched to break into a dance. She was smiling.
Her eyes shone with the joy that suffused her because she was alive and the world was such a pleasant place to live in.
People recognizing her whispered to one another as she came in.
Carruthers really felt that she brought sunshine and the scent of flowers into the sober but rather overwhelming splendour of Claridge's lounge.
He did not wait to say how do you do to her. 'Betty, you can't do it,' he said.
'It's simply out of the question.'
'Why?'
'He's awful.'
'I don't think he is.
I think he's rather nice.'
A waiter came up and took their order.
Betty looked at Carruthers with those beautiful blue eyes of hers that managed to be at the same time so gay and so tender.
'He's such a frightful bounder, Betty.'
'Oh, don't be so silly, Humphrey.
He's just as good as anybody else.
I think you're rather a snob.'
'He's so dull.'
'No, he's rather quiet.
I don't know that I want a husband who's too brilliant.
I think he'll make a very good background.
He's quite good-looking and he has nice manners.'
'My God, Betty.'
'Oh, don't be idiotic, Humphrey.'
'Are you going to pretend you're in love with him?'
'I think it would be tactful, don't you?'
'Why are you going to marry him?'
She looked at him coolly.
'He's got pots of money.
I'm nearly twenty-six.'
There was nothing much more to be said.
He drove her back to her aunt's house.
She had a very grand marriage, with dense crowds lining the approach to St Margaret's, Westminster, presents from practically all the royal family, and the honeymoon was passed on the yacht her father-in-law had lent them.
Carruthers applied for a post abroad and was sent to Rome (I was right in guessing that he had thus acquired his admirable Italian) and later to Stockholm.
Here he was counsellor and here he wrote the first of his stories.
Perhaps Betty's marriage had disappointed the British public who expected much greater things of her, perhaps only that as a young married woman she no longer appealed to the popular sense of romance; the fact was plain that she soon lost her place in the public eye.
You ceased to hear very much about her.
Not long after the marriage it was rumoured that she was going to have a baby and a little later that she had had a miscarriage.
She did not drop out of society, I suppose she continued to see her friends, but her activities were no longer spectacular.
She was certainly but seldom seen any more in those raffish assemblies where the members of a tarnished aristocracy hob-nob with the hangers-on of the arts and flatter themselves that they are being at once smart and cultured.
People said she was settling down.
They wondered how she was getting on with her husband and no sooner did they do this than they concluded that she was not getting on very well.
Presently gossip said that Jimmie was drinking too much and then, a year or two later, one heard that he had contracted tuberculosis.
The Welldon-Burnses spent a couple of winters in Switzerland.
Then the news spread that they had separated and Betty had gone to live in Rhodes.