II
Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and casually blew Carol's world to pieces.
"May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce, she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out:
"Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest little i***t in the world."
"And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it.
"Am I? Perhaps. I'v
