Lady Larkspur

A playwright has finished his finest script, but the actress who inspired it has vanished. Dick Searles confides his frustration to Singleton, a pilot recovering after service with the French Aviation Corps. The performer, known on the London stage as Violet Dewing, impressed Searles with her comic gifts, then became impossible to trace. Singleton listens with affectionate skepticism while making his own plans for rest at his uncle's property in Barton-on-the-Sound.

Meredith Nicholson's romantic novel gives these conversations a playful edge, mixing theatrical ambition with curiosity about people's identities and motives. In a later drawing-room scene, Alice Bashford's feather fan attracts an unusually close inspection from the polished visitor Montani. Singleton notices the attention beneath the polite talk of porcelain and art. Readers who enjoy witty exchanges and small social clues can follow a narrator whose eye for gestures turns an ordinary evening visit into a source of intrigue.