Vivian entered, followed by Lord Chesterford. He looked absurdly healthy and happy.
"It's a perfectly beastly day," he said cheerfully, advancing to the fireplace. "Mrs. Vivian, let Dodo send you some tea up to your room. You must be wet through. Surely it is tea-time, Dodo."
"I told you so," said Dodo to Jack.
"Has Jack been saying it isn't tea-time?" asked Chesterford.
"No," said Dodo. "I only said that your virtue in going to see almshouses would find its immediate reward in an appetite for tea."
Mrs. Vivian laughed.
"You mustn't reduce our virtues to the lowest terms, as if we were two vulgar fractions."
"Do you suppose a vulgar fraction knows how vulgar it is?" asked Miss Grantham.
"Vulgar without being funny," said. Jack, with the air of helping her out of a difficulty.
"I never saw anything funny in vulgar fractions," remarked Lord Ledgers. "Chesterford and I used to look up the answers at the end of the book, and try to make them correspond with the questions."
Dodo groaned.
"Oh, Chesterford, don't tell me you're not honest either."
"What do you think about honesty, Mrs. Vivian?" asked Miss Grantham.
Mrs. Vivian considered.
"Honesty is much maligned by being called the best policy," she said; "it' isn't purely commercial. Honesty is rather fine sometimes."
"Oh, I'm sure Mrs. Vivian's honest," murmured Miss Grantham. "She thinks before, she tells you her opinion. I always give my opinion first, and think about it afterwards."
"I've been wanting to stick up for honesty all the afternoon," said Dodo to Mrs. Vivian, "only I haven't dared. Everyone has been saying that it is dull and obtrusive, and like labourers' cottages. I believe we are all a little honest, really. No one has got any right to call it the best policy. It makes you feel as if you were either a kind of life assurance, or else a thief."
Chesterford looked a trifle puzzled.
Dodo turned to him.
"Poor old man," she said, "did they call him names? Never mind. We'll go and be labelled 'Best policy. No others need apply.'"
She got up from her chair, and pulled Chesterford's moustache.
"You look so abominably healthy, Chesterford," she said. "How's Charlie getting on? Tell him if he beats his wife anymore, I shall; beat you. You wouldn't like that, you know. Will you ring for tea, dear? Mrs. Vivian, I command you to go to your room. I had your fire lit, and I'll send tea up. You're a dripping sop."
Mrs. Vivian pleaded guilty, and vanished. Sounds of music still came from the drawing-room. "It's no use telling Edith to come to tea," remarked Dodo. "She said the other day that if anyone ever proposed to her, whom she cared to marry, she will feel it only fair to tell him that the utmost she can offer him, is to play second fiddle to her music."
Edith's music was strongly exciting, and in the pause that followed, Dodo went to the door and opened it softly, and a great tangle of melody poured out and filled the hall. She was playing the last few pages of the overture to an opera that she had nearly completed. The music was gathering itself up for the finale. Note after note was caught up, as it were, to join an army of triumphant melody overhead, which grew fuller and more complete every moment, and seemed to hover, waiting for some fulfilment. Ah, that was it. Suddenly from below crashed out a great kingly motif, strong with the strength of a man who is pure and true, rising higher and higher, till it joined the triumph overhead, and moved away, strong to the end.
There was a dead silence; Dodo was standing by the door, with her lips slightly parted, feeling that there was something in this world better and bigger, perhaps, than her own little hair-splittings and small emotions. With this in her mind, she looked across to where Chesterford was standing. The movement was purely instinctive, and she could neither have accounted for it, nor was she conscious of it, but in her eyes there was the suggestion of unshed tears, and a look of questioning shame. Though a few bars of music cannot change the nature of the weakest of us, and Dodo was far from weak, she was intensely impressionable, and that moment had for her the germ of a possibility which might—who could say it could not?—have taken root in her and borne fruit. The parable of the mustard seed is as-old and as true as time. But Chesterford was not musical; he had taken a magazine from the table, and was reading about grouse disease.
Chapter Seven
Dodo was sitting in a remarkably easy-chair in her own particular room at the house in Eaton Square. As might have been expected, her room was somewhat unlike other rooms. It had a pale orange-coloured paper, with a dado of rather more intense shade of the same colour, an orange-coloured carpet and orange-coloured curtains. Dodo had no reason to be afraid of orange colour just yet. It was a room well calculated to make complete idleness most easy. The tables were covered with a mass of albums, vases of flowers, and a quantity of entirely useless knick-knacks. The walls were hung with several rather clever sketches, French prints and caricatures of Dodo's friends. A small bookcase displayed a quantity of flaring novels and a large tune hymn-book, and in a conspicuous corner was Dodo's praying-table, on which the skull regarded its surroundings with a mirthless and possibly contemptuous grin. The mantelpiece was entirely covered with photographs, all signed by their prototypes. These had found their quarters gradually becoming too small for them, and had climbed half way up the two-sides of a Louis Quinze mirror, that formed a sort of overmantel. The photographs were an interesting study, and included representatives from a very wide range of classes. No one ever accused Dodo of being exclusive. In the corner of the room were a heap of old cotillion toys, several hunting-whips, and a small black image of the Virgin, which Dodo had picked up abroad. Above her head a fox's mask grinned defiantly at another fox's brush opposite. On the writing table there was an inkstand made of the hoof of Dodo's favourite hunter, which had joined the majority shortly after Christmas, and the "Dodo" symphony, which had just come out with great éclat at the Albert Hall, leant against the wall. A banjo case and a pair of castanets, with a dainty silver monogram on them, perhaps inspired Dodo when she sat down to her writing-table.
Dodo's hands were folded on her lap, and she was lazily regarding a photograph of herself which stood oh the mantelpiece. Though the afternoon was of a warm day in the end of May, there was a small fire on the hearth which crackled pleasantly. Dodo got up and looked at the photograph more closely. "I certainly look older," she thought to herself, "and yet that was only taken a year ago. I don't feel a bit older, at least I sha'n't when I get quite strong again. I wish Jack could have been able to come this afternoon. I am rather tired of seeing nobody except Chesterford and the baby. However, Mrs. Vivian will be here soon."
Dodo had made great friends with Mrs. Vivian during the last months. Her sister and brother-in-law had been obliged to leave England for a month at Easter, and Dodo had insisted that Mrs. Vivian should spend it with them, and to-day was the first day that the doctor had let her come down, and she had written to Jack and Mrs. Vivian to come and have tea with her.
A tap was heard at the door, and the nurse entered, bearing the three weeks' old baby. Dodo was a little disappointed; she had seen a good deal of the baby, and she particularly wanted Mrs. Vivian. She stood with her
