The lift carried them down to the restaurant floor. They dined, not too badly, at a side table from which they could view the small crowded room. Olivia felt disappointed. Only a few people were in evening dress. It was rather a dowdy assembly, very much like that in the boarding-house at Llandudno, her father’s summer holiday resort for years before the war. Her inexperience had expected the glitter and joy of London. Hospitably she offered wine, champagne, as her father, a lover of celebrations, would have done; but Lydia drank nothing with her meals—the only way not to get fat, which she dreaded. Olivia drank water. The feast seemed tame, and the imported mutton tough. She reproached herself for inadequate entertainment of her resplendent friend. They talked; chiefly Lydia, after she had received Olivia’s report on her family’s welfare and contemporary Medlow affairs; and Olivia listened contentedly, absorbing every minute strange esoteric knowledge of the great London world of which the pulsating centre appeared to be Lydia, Ltd., in Maddox Street. There Duchesses bought hats which their Dukes did not pay for. There Cabinet Ministers’ wives, in the hope of getting on the right financial side of Lydia, whispered confidential Cabinet secrets, while Ministers wondered how the deuce things got into the papers. There romantic engagements were brought from inception to maturity. There also, had she chosen to keep a record, she could have accumulated enough evidence to bring about the divorces of half the aristocracy of England. She rattled off the names like a machine-gun. She impressed Olivia with the fact that Lydia, Ltd., was not a mere hat shop, but a social institution of which Lydia Dawlish was the creating and inspiring personality. Lydia, it appeared, weekended at great houses. “You see, my dear, my husband was the son of an Honourable and the grandson of an Earl. He hadn’t much money, poor darling, but still he had the connection, most useful to me nowadays. The family buy their hats from me, and spread the glad tidings.” She commanded a legion of men who had vowed that she should live, free of charge, on the fat of the land, and should travel whithersoever she desired in swift and luxurious motor-cars.