“I think it calls for a celebration,” said Lulu. “It’s Tuesday, isn’t it? Let’s ask Emma to come here for dinner, and I’ll cook something nice. Do you want to ask Jamie, too?”

“Oh.” Sophie, who had been doing pliés in front of the window, stopped. “That’s so sweet of you, Lulu-belle, it would have been lovely. But I’m going out to celebrate with Rupert.”

“Rupert?”

“You met him on Saturday? Tall, sort of dark, a bit pink shirty, but very nice? He’s taking me to Baldini’s, the place in Time Out, it’s supposed to be amazing.”

“Oh, him.” The young man who had come to pick Sophie up for her date last Saturday. He was handsome, of course, and had not cared for Lulu, nor had he pretended to.

“Didn’t you like him?” said Sophie. “He’s really interesting once you get to know him. He does an amazing trick with a beer bottle and a five-pound note.”

“Sounds electrifying. Where did you meet him?”

“Around.” Sophie shrugged; she was accustomed to meeting, and attracting, young men wherever she went. “And speaking of him, I have to go and make myself beautiful for him. Let’s celebrate later on, Lulu, you and me. Shall we go to the pub tomorrow? I’ll buy you a drink. Play your cards right, and I’ll throw in a Scotch egg.”

She would not have to work very hard to make herself beautiful, thought Lulu a little sadly after her sister had left the room. Blessed as Sophie was with prettiness as well as charm, it was no wonder that men sought her out. Lulu wandered to the mirror above the fireplace and inspected her own face—ordinary of feature, she had always thought, the eyes a little too intense for comfort beneath the curtain of wild hair—and wondered, as she sometimes did, how it would feel to be blond and lighthearted and taken to dinner in fashionable restaurants by young men who did amazing tricks with beer bottles. Of course Sophie would want to go out tonight instead of celebrating with the family, she reminded herself; she could enjoy Emma’s company and Lulu’s cooking any time she chose. If Lulu had been in Sophie’s place—if she had known what she wanted to do professionally, and had just been given an extraordinarily exciting opportunity to do it, and if, besides, there were a young man in her life who was offering to take her to dinner at a fashionable restaurant to celebrate this—then Lulu would doubtless have gone out to celebrate, too. But there was no young man who was offering to take her to dinner currently, and no young man she particularly wanted to be invited by, either, and, Lord knew, there was little enough to celebrate on the professional front. She frowned at herself, realizing that she had not yet told Sophie her own professional news. Well, it could wait till tomorrow, she thought; there was no point in dampening Sophie’s evening as well as her own.