“I drank a certain amount of champagne and, as always when one is emotionally upset, it did not make me gay, but rather more sombre, so that I saw everything about me with a jaundiced eye. The girls who would have intrigued me in the past seemed dull and rather sordid. I asked three of them to sit and drink with me, more because I was afraid of my own company than because I desired theirs.”
Cornelia tried not to let the gladness she felt show in her face as she had been afraid of those pretty ladies, especially the one who was fair and blue-eyed like Aunt Lily.
“Then I saw Renée de Valmé arrive,” the Duke went on, “and I was glad because Renée is an old friend of mine and at times, as you know, she is a serious person and one can talk to her as one can talk to an understanding and very i
