The Great Pearl Secret

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III TO MEET THE DUCHESS Mbs. Lowndes, Emmy West's sister-in-law, was giving a luncheon for the Duchess of Claremanagh; and the Duchess was late. Nine lovely ladies (including the hostess) were waiting for her in the Futurist drawing room of an apartment overlooking the Park. It was not to all...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III TO MEET THE DUCHESS Mbs. Lowndes, Emmy West's sister-in-law, was giving a luncheon for the Duchess of Claremanagh; and the Duchess was late. Nine lovely ladies (including the hostess) were waiting for her in the Futurist drawing room of an apartment overlooking the Park. It was not to all tastes a beautiful drawing room, but it was expensive for all purses. So was the apartment; too expensive, Billy Lowndes' friends said, for his. As for the ladies, each one was beautiful, or her clothes were; for Nat Lowndes had chosen her guests with the special view of impressing the Duchess, whom Billy had tried to marry when she was Miss Phayre. The invitations were for one-fifteen, and before one-thirty every one had arrived?except the Duchess. By twenty to two the nine voices were chattering with almost abnormal gaiety, but ears and eyes were secretly on the alert. Natalie Lowndes was not precisely in the Duchess' set, or if she was, moved on the chilled outer edge of it. These women who chatted in her startling salon would have preferred other engagements, if they had not been asked tomeet the Duchess of Claremanagh. Most of them knew that Billy had desperately wanted Juliet Phayre, and that Juliet had been at school with his sister, Lady West, now in London. Their private opinion was that the Duchess had accepted for Lady West's sake rather than Mrs. Lowndes'; and as the minutes lagged, they wondered if the chief guest were purposely proving her slight esteem of the circle. This idea ruffled their vanity, and as they talked, glancing at wrist watches, their irritation grew. Natalie who, like her husband, was from the Middle West, felt the atmosphere of her overheated room fall to zero. She began to feel sick at heart, and tears pricked her eyelids. But she kept...