Stella was lazy, and if Chrissie bewailed the fact once, she bewailed it over a dozen times a day. Sometimes she felt as if she could strike Stella for her good humoured stupidity, for the smile which was her invariable response to the most acid criticism, for the carefree, unworried manner in which she invariably received the information that yet another admirer had departed or been filched away from her by a more assiduous rival.

A conversation between the sisters a week before the Rajah appeared so providentially was typical of a hundred others.

‘You haven’t had a flower of any sort for over a fortnight,’ Chrissie had said. Not even a dead daisy has turned up with your name on it. What’s happened to young Lord Ripon? Is he out of town?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Stella replied. ‘Dilly said she was supping with him last night after the show.’

So Dilly’s got him, has she?’ Chrissie said, her voice hard and bitter. ‘Why did you let her take him? She set her cap at him from the moment he set foot inside the Stage Door.’

‘She can have him,’ Stella answered, yawning a little. ‘He was a bore anyway, always talking about racing. I never did care for horses.’

‘But you could pretend, couldn’t you?’ Chrissie asked.

Stella laughed.

‘I did try, but I got their anatomy all muddled up. Funny things, horses, they have different names from us for what appears to me to be a very similar part of the body – ’

‘Oh, damn the horses!’ Chrissie stamped her foot. ‘It’s his lordship I’m thinking about. He’s rich, Stella, rich and generous. But what have you got out of it I’d like to know! A brooch that won’t fetch more than ten pounds, gloves that you didn’t want and half a dozen boxes of chocolates. Chocolates, I ask you!’

‘They’re good ones at any rate,’ Stella remarked good humouredly. ‘Why don’t you have one?’

But Chrissie had stamped her foot and nagged at Stella until the latter fell asleep still with a smile on her lips.

Nothing seemed to perturb Stella’s good humour and she had learned long ago not to listen to Chrissie when she was annoyed.

Sometimes after one of these scenes Chrissie would look at herself in the mirror and wonder why Providence in the creating of herself and Stella had been so cruel. For cruel it was to give Chrissie a shrewd, quick brain with a deformed hunchbacked body and to dole out to Stella a beautiful body and no brain whatsoever.

‘If only I could look like Stella,’ Chrissie would think. ‘I could get anywhere – anywhere.’

Instead the role she had to play was to propel, push and nag the lazy, unambitious Stella into taking advantage of her very obvious attractions.