In the course of the morning she contrived a meeting with Gaymer’s aunt Lady Poynter; encountering Lady Maitland at luncheon, she mentioned Ivy’s name and returned home in time for tea with a collection of opinions which crystallized in the vigorous statement that Mr. Justice Maitland was a fool, Gaymer a cad and Ivy a child whom one had not seen since she was a baby.
“What is it, exactly, that you want to find out?,” asked Amy when Eric arrived.
“I hardly know... I’ve met this girl half a dozen times; she’s a nice child, but rather impulsive and very easily led. She’s not happy at home, and I fancy she’s allowing Gaymer to lead her... Let me put it this way: if she were your sister, would you entrust her to him with an easy mind?”
“No! I daresay I’m old-fashioned... Mr. Lane, I’m waiting for a hideous scandal—not with her, poor child, but with all these girls who’ve broken away from home during the war, all the men too, who’ve been allowed so much liberty with girls that they’ve lost the old reverence that men like you or my brother Jim had. The parents are to blame—”
“But the children suffer,” Eric interrupted. “That’s an epitome of the world’s history. And it’s equally true if you put it the other way round... But what are we to do with this girl?”
A fleeting glance at Eric’s worried eyes told her that he was less concerned for the world’s history of suffering than for Ivy’s immediate welfare; his use of the plural shewed that they were to be joined in a common rescue; and her mind, seizing the possibility that Eric might be in love, bounded forward to consider whether he should be helped to fall deeper in love with a girl who possessed superficially little more than the daintiness and intoxicating lure of adolescence.
“Tell me about her,” she suggested. “I should like to help if I could.”
Eric described their fragmentary conversation in New York, on the _Lithuania_, at Lady John Carstairs’ and in Ivy’s attic behind the Adelphi, adding guesswork sketches of the establishment in the Cromwell Road with an unsympathetic father and a helpless mother. Neither the range of his information nor his manner of giving it betrayed any great intimacy.
“Has she any other relations?,” asked Amy.