the evening, and she liked this lady who didn’t seem to believe that any of the first-class passengers were to be idolized at all. Vida’s eyes roamed the room for someone interesting enough that she’d want to learn their secrets. But her gaze became fixed and her bottom lip dropped at the sight of someone not fancy at all.
“Now, darlings, tell me, whom do you most want to meet?”
“Who is that?” Vida asked. She would not ordinarily have spoken so impulsively, but her anger had returned, heating her blood and bringing color to her face. The nobody from the map room had caught her eye. He was lingering near the grand doorway with that same easy posture and insolent face. She was glad to feel angry, actually. She much preferred anger to mortification.
“Who?” The woman squinted.
“There.” Vida pointed, and then remembered that that was the sort of thing that got a girl like her in trouble, and bent her arm back into her lap. Too late, though. The nobody, even all that way across the room, noticed, and his mouth slipped into a grin.
“Oh . . . no.” The word dropped right out of the lady’s mouth and she was violent in getting another cigarette lit. “And here I thought you were sharp. He’s a nobody, dear girl.”
“Oh yes. I know. I’m not desirous of meeting him—he was rude to me, that’s all, and I was curious where he got his gall.”
“He probably works for one of these gents with egalitarian ideals,” the woman went on, as though gents with ideals were an unfortunate but unavoidable part of life in these modern times. “Anyway, I see Mr. Selvedge has been through and done all the complimenting I was going to do, so I won’t bore you ladies with your qualifications, your stunning wit, and your fine dress and all that rot. But here’s what I do. I try my best to know all the pretty things, for that is where the stories are. My name is Dame Edna—Edna Sackville. I am sure you have read my column in The Daily Chimera.” Here she paused significantly, and met Vida’s eye.
So this was the lady who had written about her little spree of the night before! Vida knew she should be cross with this woman who had publicized her unladylike behavior, whose column had forced her to pack her bags in the fog of the morning and to find herself on the open ocean now. But in fact she was delighted. The way for a girl to have an adventure, as she had long known, was to make herself seem exciting to people so that she is invited absolutely everywhere. The social columnists were the most useful in making oneself seem exciting. And Vida chastised herself inwardly for having pursued Fitzhugh so artlessly, when the person whose connection she should have really been after was here before her. “Oh,” Vida said. “I’ve heard of it.”
“Yes, I’m sure you have. It’s all about the shiny young people like you.”
“Like me?” Vida asked, and gave Dame Edna a little smile to show she wasn’t shy of the attention.
“Exactly. I know a good story when I see one, and you’re it, dear. Anybody you would like to meet, just ask old Edna. They may not like me, dears, but they fear me. And that is better.”
She brandished a card of fine emerald-colored stock with her name printed in gold, and then she shook her arm so that a little gold pen, attached to her wrist by a gold chain, fell out, and she wrote on the back the number of her cabin. “Come any time, day or night, with whatever story you have to tell,” she said. “I will always listen, and I will repay you in kind.”
“Is this woman bothering you?”
For a marvelous stretch of minutes Vida had forgotten her failure of that afternoon, and had become absorbed instead in the juicy promises of Dame Edna. She had idly draped her fingertips on the edge of an empty crystal champagne glass, and allowed herself to imagine other adventures. But then the young man interrupted them, and it occurred to her that she had heard his voice before, that commanding yet unperturbed voice asking if she were bothered.
She glanced up at the face of Fitzhugh Farrar. Last night she’d seen it plenty, though that all seemed a bit fuzzy and faraway now. Somehow he was handsomer than she remembered. His sandy hair was neatly slicked