Ida’s neck tensed for a moment, rigid with strings and tendons. Then she turned away with an aggrieved toss of her ostrich plumes and refused to speak another word to Collis until they reached Broadway at Franklin.

Steadman, with one of his old smiles, assisted them to alight outside Taylor’s. Collis told him to wait around the corner, and then he and his mother went in through the glass doors to the grand saloon of Broadway’s most gilded and decorative restaurant. As usual at this time of day, the pillared saloon was humming and twittering with the conversation of ladies who had withdrawn from the midday heat and the dust and crush of shopping to take ices, omelettes, sandwiches, or coffee. They sat clustered, these ladies, in their fashionable dresses of canary yellow and emerald green and sapphire blue, around an archipelago of more than a hundred black walnut tables, their gloved hands fluttering, their feathered bonnets bobbing, and their laughter chirruping above the background bustle like flocks of birds on park railings.

The maître d’, in magnificent muttonchops and a swallow-tailed coat, bowed as Ida stalked in, followed at a diffident distance by Collis. He guided them, in a whole cloud of ‘good mornings’, and ‘pleasant days’, and stale perspiration odours, to a table by the mirrored wall on the right-hand side of the restaurant. There he left them in the hands of a rather surly young uniformed waiter, who took their order for coffee and pâté sandwiches in a slow, sloping hand, as if he didn’t care if he was going to be able to read it back or not. Taylor’s interior decor was celestial, but its service was generally regarded as abysmal.

‘Well, Mother?’ asked Collis. But Ida shushed him. She had wanted to sit by the mirrors because it was cooler there, away from the windows; and because, more important, she could admire herself in the glass from time to time without seeming vainer than she actually was; and because, even more important, she could see Winifred Spooner and Delphine the moment they walked in.

‘I hope you’re not going to say anything embarrassing, Mother, when you introduce us,’ said Collis. He was feeling unaccountably nervous, although he couldn’t think why. He had flirted with enough women, both high life and low life, not to be alarmed by a girl like Delphine Spooner. Perhaps it was the fact that he was considering marriage, and settling down, that was giving him such palpitations.

‘What do you mean by “embarrassing”?’ asked his mother haughtily. ‘Do you mean that I should refrain from telling Delphine the truth about you, that you are an insolent scoundrel, and a gambler, and a frequenter of whorehouses?’

A thin elderly woman in black, eating cinnamon cakes at the next table, turned and stared at Ida in alarm, but Ida cut her down with a glare that could have boiled ice.