Christmas caused a break in these social activities. Lydia took her off to Brighton, where, meeting various acquaintances of her chaperone and making others of her own, she motored and danced and danced and motored, and in the pursuit of these delights discovered, with a fearful joy, that she could hold her own in the immemorial conflict of sex. Sydney Rooke, having driven down for the day, occasionally flashed through the hotel, the eternal smile of youth on his dark, lined face and his gestures unceasingly polite. As he passed, the heavens opened and rained champagne and boxes of chocolate and hot-house fruits and flowers and embroidered handbags, and once, a Pekinese dog for Lydia. Once again, an automobile seemed about to fall, but at Lydia’s protests it melted in the ether. “A dog and a rose and a glass of wine,” said she, “are a woman’s due for amusing a man. But a motor-car is profiteering. Besides, it’s bound to drive you somewhere in the end—either to the flat of shame or the country house of married respectability: it only depends on who is at the wheel.” “I see,” said Olivia. But she didn’t. Sydney Rooke was a mystery; and Lydia’s attitude towards him was more than her inexperience could understand. Still, there she was in the pleasant galley and she did not question what she was doing in it. In a dim way she regarded it as the inevitable rescue vessel after universal shipwreck. Her eyes were blinded by its glitter and her ears deafened by its music to the welter of the unsalved world. Just before New Year she received a letter from Bobby Quinton. It began: “Dearest of Ladies.” Never before having been thus apostrophized, she thought it peculiarly graceful and original. The writing was refined and exquisitely clear. To his dearest of ladies the young man bewailed her absence; life was dreary without her friendship and encouragement; all this Christmastide he was the loneliest thing on earth; he suggested that there was no one to love him—no mother or sisters to whom he could apply for comfort; this terrible night life to which he, poor demobilized soldier of fortune, was condemned in order to earn his bread, weighed upon his spirits and affected his health; he envied his dearest of ladies’ sojourn by the invigorating sea; he longed for the taste of it; but such health-restoring rapture he gave her, in the most delicate way, to understand, was for fairy princesses and not for the impecunious demobbed; he counted the days till her return and prayed her to bring back a whiff of ozone on her garments to revive the ever faithful one who had the temerity to try to teach her to dance.