—or was it Senegalese—dancer? asked Mrs. Champion. She had commanded Janey and Margaret to shield their faces with their fans). Lilli Barr was the same girl with whom Richard Callendar had lunched so many times in the open window at Sherry's. She saw fit to pass over the implication, thrust in slyly by Mrs. Champion, that he was making the girl, after so many years, an honest woman. Because she herself did not really know.
And speaking of the divorce, she remarked brazenly, "It was all settled without difficulty. I knew that he was planning to marry her. We talked it over and thought it the best solution."
At which Mrs. Champion shook her head and made a clucking sound to indicate, as clearly as she dared, that the cold-blooded behavior of Sabine's generation in such matters was obscene and immoral. And the Apostle to the Genteel, in obeisance to his high church opinions and his disapproval of divorce, looked gravely and silently into the depths of his sherbet, but with an air of believing that there was much to be said on both sides. (It would not be wise to offend so rich and fashionable a woman as Sabine Callendar.) Janey and Margaret only stared at her, with the round, stupid eyes of little girls.
And when she left (a little after nine when she could endure the party no longer) Mrs. Champion was able at last to deliver the blow which she had held in reserve all the evening. As they stood in the porte cochère waiting for Sabine's motor to come up, she murmured under the protection of the darkness, "I could have warned you long ago, my dear. You should never have married Richard Callendar. If you had a mother—" She sighed and continued. "I should never have allowed Janey or Margaret to accept a proposal from him."
Such a speech would have made her angry once and have aroused the sharp tongue for which she had been famous; but it made no difference to her now, save that it amused her to think of Janey or Margaret standing there, a pair of Alices in Wonderland, as the wife of Richard. And she reflected that she possessed an experience which they would never know. It was better to have been
