She read the advertisements of money-lenders who yearned to advance
fabulous sums to the nobility and gentry on their simple notes of hand.
She read the thinly disguised professional cards of lonely ladies whose
unhappy lot could be mitigated only by congenial male companionship.
She read the ingenuous matrimonial bids.
She read the announcement of the lady of (deleted) title who was willing,
for a substantial consideration, to introduce gentlefolk of means and their
daughters to the most exclusive social circles.
She read the naive solicitation of the alleged ex-officer of the B.E.F.,
who had won through the war with every known decoration except the Double
Cross of the Order of St. Gall and with nothing of his anatomy left whole
except his cheek, begging some great-hearted soul to buy him a barrel organ
to play in the streets.
And then her eye was arrested by the appearance of her own name in the text
of a brief advertisement, which she read naturally, with heightened
interest:
IF MICHAEL LANYARD will communicate privately he will hear news of Sofia
his daughter. Address Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, Lincoln's Inn Fields,
W.C. 3
IV
MUTINY
Sofia had never heard the name of Michael Lanyard. Neither did the firm
style of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, mean anything to her.
Notwithstanding, she wasted more time than she knew trying to picture to
herself a man who looked like Michael Lanyard sounded, and wishing (no
matter what his looks might be) that she were his long-lost daughter Sofia,
and that he would see the advertisement, and communicate privately as
requested, and hear news of her, and come speeding in a Rolls-Royce to the
Cafe des Exiles, and walk in and humble Papa Dupont with a look of hauteur
and confound Mama Therese with a peremptory word, and take Sofia by the
hand and lead her out and induct her into such an environment as suited her
rightful station: said environment necessarily comprising a town house if
not on Park Lane at least nearly adjacent to it, and a country house
sitting, in the mellowed beauty of its Seventeenth Century architecture,
amid lordly acres of velvet lawn and private park.
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