The Toys of Peace | Page 6

bridge. I'll go and telephone to Lord
Carrywood and find out."
"Is that you, Lord Carrywood?" she queried over the telephone; "it's me,
Jane Thropplestance. I want to know, have you seen Louise?"
"'Louise,'" came the answer, "it's been my fate to see it three times. At
first, I must admit, I wasn't impressed by it, but the music grows on one
after a bit. Still, I don't think I want to see it again just at present. Were
you going to offer me a seat in your box?"
"Not the opera 'Louise'--my niece, Louise Thropplestance. I thought I
might have left her at your house."
"You left cards on us this afternoon, I understand, but I don't think you
left a niece. The footman would have been sure to have mentioned it if
you had. Is it going to be a fashion to leave nieces on people as well as
cards? I hope not; some of these houses in Berkeley-square have
practically no accommodation for that sort of thing."

"She's not at the Carrywoods'," announced Jane, returning to her tea;
"now I come to think of it, perhaps I left her at the silk counter at
Selfridge's. I may have told her to wait there a moment while I went to
look at the silks in a better light, and I may easily have forgotten about
her when I found I hadn't your pattern with me. In that case she's still
sitting there. She wouldn't move unless she was told to; Louise has no
initiative."
"You said you tried to match the silk at Harrod's," interjected the
dowager.
"Did I? Perhaps it was Harrod's. I really don't remember. It was one of
those places where every one is so kind and sympathetic and devoted
that one almost hates to take even a reel of cotton away from such
pleasant surroundings."
"I think you might have taken Louise away. I don't like the idea of her
being there among a lot of strangers. Supposing some unprincipled
person was to get into conversation with her."
"Impossible. Louise has no conversation. I've never discovered a single
topic on which she'd anything to say beyond 'Do you think so? I dare
say you're right.' I really thought her reticence about the fall of the
Ribot Ministry was ridiculous, considering how much her dear mother
used to visit Paris. This bread and butter is cut far too thin; it crumbles
away long before you can get it to your mouth. One feels so absurd,
snapping at one's food in mid-air, like a trout leaping at may-fly."
"I am rather surprised," said the dowager, "that you can sit there
making a hearty tea when you've just lost a favourite niece."
"You talk as if I'd lost her in a churchyard sense, instead of having
temporarily mislaid her. I'm sure to remember presently where I left
her."
"You didn't visit any place of devotion, did you? If you've left her
mooning about Westminster Abbey or St. Peter's, Eaton Square,
without being able to give any satisfactory reason why she's there, she'll
be seized under the Cat and Mouse Act and sent to Reginald
McKenna."
"That would be extremely awkward," said Jane, meeting an irresolute
piece of bread and butter halfway; "we hardly know the McKennas, and
it would be very tiresome having to telephone to some unsympathetic
private secretary, describing Louise to him and asking to have her sent

back in time for dinner. Fortunately, I didn't go to any place of devotion,
though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army procession. It was
quite interesting to be at close quarters with them, they're so absolutely
different to what they used to be when I first remember them in the
'eighties. They used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort
of smiling rage with the world, and now they're spruce and jaunty and
flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious
convictions. Laura Kettleway was going on about them in the lift of the
Dover Street Tube the other day, saying what a lot of good work they
did, and what a loss it would have been if they'd never existed. 'If they
had never existed,' I said, 'Granville Barker would have been certain to
have invented something that looked exactly like them.' If you say
things like that, quite loud, in a Tube lift, they always sound like
epigrams."
"I think you ought to do something about Louise," said the dowager.
"I'm trying to think whether she was with me when I called on Ada
Spelvexit. I rather enjoyed myself there. Ada was trying, as usual, to
ram that odious Koriatoffski woman down my throat, knowing
perfectly well that I detest her, and in an unguarded moment she said:
'She's leaving her