Читать книгу The Convert - Elizabeth Robins - Страница 4

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There were already a dozen or so persons in the gold-and-white drawing-room, yet the moment Vida Levering entered, she knew from the questing glance Mrs. Freddy sent past her children's visitor, that even now the party was not complete.

Other eyes turned that way as the servant announced 'Miss Levering.' It is seldom that in this particular stratum of London life anything so uncontrolled and uncontrollable as a 'sensation' is permitted to chequer the even distribution of subdued good humour that reigns so modestly in the drawing-rooms of the Tunbridge world. If any one is so ill-advised as to bring to these gatherings anything resembling a sensation, even if it is of the less challengeable sort of striking personal beauty, the general aim of the company is to pretend either that they see nothing unusual in the conjunction, or that they, for their part, are impervious to such impacts. Vida Levering's beauty was not strictly of the éclatant type. If it did—as could not be denied—arrest the eye, its refusal to let attention go was mitigated by something in the quietness, the disarming softness, with which the hold was maintained. Men making her acquaintance frequently went through four distinct phases in their feeling about her. The first was the common natural one, the instant stirring of the pulses that beauty of any sort produces in persons having the eye that sees. The second stage was a rousing of the instinct to be 'on guard,' which feminine beauty not infrequently breeds in the breasts of men. Not on guard so much against the thing itself, or even against ready submission to it, but against allowing onlookers to be witness of such submission. Even the very young man knows either by experience or hearsay, that women have concentrated upon their faculty for turning this particular weapon to account, all the skill they would have divided among other resources had there been others. Yet the charm is something too delicious even to desire to escape from—the impulse centres in a determination to seem untouched, immune.

The third stage in this declension from pleasure through caution to reassurance is induced by something so gentle, so unemphatic in the Vida Levering aspect, so much what the man thinks 'feminine,' that even the wariest male is reassured. He comes to be almost as easy before this particular type of allurement as he would be with the frankly plain 'good sort'; only there is all about him the exquisite aroma of a subtle charm which he may almost persuade himself that he alone perceives, since this softly gracious creature seems so little to insist upon it—seems, indeed, to be herself unaware of its presence. Whereupon the man conceives a new idea of his own perspicacity in detecting a thing at once so agreeable and so little advertised. He may, with a woman of this kind, go long upon the third 'tack'—may, indeed, never know it was she who gently 'shunted' him, still unenlightened, and left him side-tracked, but cherishing to the end of time the soothing conviction that he 'might an' if he would.' To the more robust order of man will come a day of awakening, when he rubs his eyes and retreats hurriedly with a sense of good faith injured—nay, of hopes positively betrayed. If she were 'that sort,' why not hang out some signal? It wasn't playing fair.

And so without anything so crude as a sensation, but with a retinue of covert looks following in her train, she made her way to the young hostess, and was there joined by two men and a middle-aged woman, who plainly had been a beauty, and though 'gone to fat,' as the vulgar say, had yet kept her complexion. With an air of genial authority, the pink-cheeked Lady John Ulland proceeded to appropriate the new-comer in the midst of a general hum of conversation, whose key to the sensitive ear had become a little heightened since the last arrival. The women grew more insistently vivacious in proportion as the men's minds seemed to wander from matters they had discussed contentedly enough before.

Mrs. Freddy Tunbridge was a very popular person. It was agreed that nobody willingly missed one of her parties. There were those who said this was not so much because of her and Mr. Freddy, though they were eminently likeable people; not merely because you met 'everybody' there, and not even because of the excellence of their dinners. Notoriously this last fact fails to appeal very powerfully to the majority of women, and it is they, not men, who make the social reputation of the hostess. There was in this particular case a theory, held even by those who did not care especially about Mrs. Freddy, that hers was an 'amusing,' above all, perhaps, a 'becoming,' house. People had a pleasant consciousness of looking uncommon well in her pretty drawing-room. Others said it wasn't the room, it was the lighting, which certainly was most discerningly done—not dim, and yet so far from glaring that quite plain people enjoyed there a brief unwonted hour of good looks. Only a limited amount of electricity was used, and that little was carefully masked and modulated, while the two great chandeliers each of them held aloft a very forest of wax candles. It was known, too, that the spell was in no danger of being rudely broken. The same tender but festive radiance would bathe the hospitable board of the great oak dining-room below.

And why were they not processing thither?

'Is it my sister who is late?' Miss Levering asked, turning her slim neck in that deliberate way of hers to look about the room.

'No; your sister is over there, talking to—— Oh—a——' Mrs. Freddy, having looked round to refresh her memory, was fain to slur over the fact that Mrs. Fox-Moore was in the corner by the pierced screen, not talking to any one, but, on the contrary, staring dark-visaged, gloomy, sibylline, at a leaflet advertising a charity concert, a document conspicuously left by Mrs. Freddy on a little table. On her way to rescue Mrs. Fox-Moore from her desert island of utter loneliness, Mrs. Freddy saw Sir William Haycroft, the newly-made Cabinet Minister, rather pointedly making his escape from a tall, keen-looking, handsome woman wearing eye-glasses and iron-grey hair dressed commandingly.

Without a qualm Mrs. Freddy abandoned Mrs. Fox-Moore to prolonged exile, in order to soothe the ruffled minister.

'I think,' she said, pausing in front of the great man and delicately offering him an opportunity to make any predilection known—'I think you know every one here.'

Haycroft muttered in his beard—but his eyes had lit upon the new face.

'Who's that?' he said; but his tone added, 'Not that it matters.'

'You don't know her? Well, that's a proof of how you've neglected your friends since the new Government came in. But you really mean it—that nobody has introduced you to Miss Levering yet? What is Freddy thinking about!'

'Dinner!' replied a voice at her elbow with characteristic laconism, and Freddy Tunbridge pulled out his watch.

'Oh, give them five minutes more,' said his wife, indulgently.

'That's not a daughter of old Sir Hervey?' pursued the other man, his eyes still on the young woman talking to Lady John and the foreign ambassador.

'Yes; go on,' said Mrs. Freddy, with as cloudless a brow as though she had no need to manufacture conversation while the dinner was being kept waiting. 'Go on! They all do it.'

'Do what?' demanded the great man, suspiciously.

'"Why haven't they seen her before" comes next. Then the next time you and I meet in the country or find ourselves alone in a crush, you'll be saying, "What's her story? Why hasn't a woman like that married?" They all do! You don't believe me? Just wait! Freddy shall take you over, and——' Was Mrs. Freddy beaming at the prospective success of her new friend, or was her vanity flattered by reflecting upon her own perspicacity? Unavoidable as it was in a way that Mrs. Graham Townley should be taken down to dinner by the new minister—nevertheless the antidote had been cleverly provided for. 'Freddy dear—why, I thought he was—— Oh, there he is!' Seeing her hungry husband safely anchored in front of the iris gown, instantly she abandoned the idea of disturbing him. 'After all,' she said, turning again to Haycroft, who had stood the image of stolid unimpressionableness—'after all, Freddy's right. Since she's going to sit beside you at dinner, it's a good reason for not making you known to each other before. Or perhaps you never experience that awful feeling of being talked out by the time you go down, and not having a single thing left——' She saw that the great man was not going to vouchsafe any contribution to her small attempt to keep the ball rolling; so without giving him the chance to mark her failure by a silence, however brief, she chattered on. 'Though with Vida you're not likely to find yourself in that predicament. Is he, Ronald?' With the instinct of the well-trained female to draw into her circle any odd man hovering about on the periphery, Mrs. Freddy appealed to her brother-in-law. Lord Borrodaile turned in her direction his long sallow face—a face that would have been saturnine but for its touch of whimsicality and a singularly charming smile. 'My brother-in-law will bear me out,' Mrs. Freddy went on, quite as though breaking off a heated argument.

Lord Borrodaile sauntered up and offered a long thin hand to Haycroft ('the fella who's bringing the country to the dogs,' as Mrs. Freddy knew right well was his conviction).

Steering wide of politics, 'I gather,' he said, with his air of amiable boredom, 'that you were discussing what used in the days of my youth to be called a lady's "conversational powers."'

'I forbid you to apply such deadly phrases to my friend,' Mrs. Freddy denounced him. 'Your friend, too!'

'I'll prove my title to the distinction by proclaiming that she has the subtlest art a woman can possess.'

'Ah, that's more like it!' said Mrs. Freddy, gaily. 'What is the subtlest art?'

'The art of being silent without being dull.'

If there was any sting in this for the lady nearest him, she gave no sign of making the personal application.

'Now I expressly forbid your encouraging Vida in silence! Most men like to be amused. You know perfectly well you do!'

'Ah, yes,' he said languidly, catching Haycroft's eye and almost making terms with him upon a common ground of masculine understanding. 'Yes, yes. It is well known what children we are. Pleased with a rattle!' Then, as if fearing he might be going too far, he smiled that disarming smile of his, and said good-humouredly, 'I know now why you are called a good hostess.'

'Why?' asked the lady a little anxiously, for his compliments were not always soothing.

A motion towards the watch-pocket. 'No one, to look at you, would suppose that your spirit was racked between the clock and the door.'

'Oh,' she said, relieved, 'if they come in five minutes or so, you'll see! The dinner won't be a penny the worse. Jules is such a wizard. All I mind is seeing Freddy fussed.' She turned with an engaging smile to her minister again. 'Freddy has the most angelic temper except when he's hungry—bless him! Now that he's talking to Vida Levering, Freddy'll forget whether it's before dinner or after.'

'What! what!' said a brisk old gentleman, with a face like a peculiarly wicked monkey. He abandoned Mrs. Townley with enthusiasm in order to say to his hostess, 'Show me the witch who can work that spell!'

'Oh, dear, I'm afraid,' said Mrs. Freddy, prettily, 'I'm dreadfully afraid that means you're starving! Does it make you morose as it does Freddy?' she asked, with an air of comic terror. 'Then we won't wait.' She tossed out one arm with a funny little movement that sent her thin draperies floating as though towards the bell.

'My dear lady!' the old gentleman arrested her. 'I hunger, it is true, but only for knowledge.' In a silent but rather horrible laugh he wrinkled up his aged nose, which was quite enough wrinkled and sufficiently 'up' already. 'Who is the witch?'

'Why, we were talking about a member of your family.' She turned again to the new minister. 'Mr. Fox-Moore—Sir—oh! how absurd! I was going to introduce two pillars of the State to one another. I must be anxious about those late people, after all.'

'As a matter of fact you and I never have met,' said Haycroft, cordially taking old Mr. Fox-Moore's hand. 'Beside you permanent officials we ephemeræ, the sport of parties——'

'Ah, that's all right!' Mrs. Freddy's head, poised an instant on one side, seemed to say.

'Who is it? Who is late?' demanded Mrs. Graham Townley, whose entrance into the conversation produced the effect of the sudden opening of window and door on a windy day. People shrink a little in the draught, and all light, frivolous things are blown out of the way. English people stand this sort of thing very much as they stand the actual draughts in their cold houses. They feel it to be good for them on the whole. Mrs. Graham Townley was acknowledged to be a person of much character. Though her interest in public affairs was bounded only by the limits of the Empire, she had found time to reform the administration of a great London hospital. Also she was related to a great many people. In the ultra smart set she of course had no raison d'être, but in the older society it was held meet that these things be. So that when she put her question, not only was she not ignored, but each one felt it a serious thing for anybody to be so late that Mrs. Graham Townley instead of button-holing some one with, 'What, now, should you say is the extent of the Pan-Islamic influence in Egypt?' should be reduced to asking, 'Who are we waiting for?'

'It's certain to be a man,' said Lady John Ulland, as calmly convinced as one who states a natural law.

'Why?' asked her niece, the charming girl in rose colour.

'No woman would dare to come in so late as this. She'd have turned back and telephoned that the horses had run away with her or something of the sort.'

'Dick Farnborough won't turn back.'

'Oh, Mr. Farnborough's the culprit!' said a smartly dressed woman, with a nervous, rather angry air, though the ropes of fine pearls she wore might, some would think, have soothed the most savage breast.

'Yes, Dick and Captain Beeching!' said Mrs. Freddy; 'and I shall give them just two minutes more!'

'Aunt Ellen said it couldn't be a woman,' remarked the girl in pink, as one struck with such perspicacity.

'Well, I wouldn't ask them again to my house,' said the discontented person with the pearls.

'Yes, she would,' Lady John said aside to Borrodaile. 'She has a daughter, and so have most of the London hostesses, and the young villains know it.'

'Oh, yes; sometimes they never turn up at all,' said the pink niece.

'After accepting!' ejaculated Lady Whyteleafe of the pearls.

'Oh, yes; sometimes they don't even answer.'

'I never heard of such impudence.'

'I have, twice this year,' said Mrs. Graham Townley, with that effect of breaking by main force into a conversation instead of being drawn into it. 'Twice in this last year I've sat with an empty place on one side of me at a dinner-party. On each occasion it was a young member of parliament who never turned up and never sent an apology.'

'The same man both times?' asked Lord Borrodaile.

'Yes; different houses, but the same man.'

'He knew!' whispered Borrodaile in Lady John's ear.

'Dick Farnborough has been complaining that since he smashed his motor all existence has become disorganized. I always feel'—the hostess addressed herself to the minister and the pearls—'don't you, that one ought to stretch a point for people who have to go about in cabs?'

As Haycroft began a disquisition on the changes in social life initiated by the use of the motor-car, Mrs. Freddy floated away.

Borrodaile, looking after her, remarked, 'It's humane of my sister-in-law to think of making allowances. Most of us gratify the dormant cruelty in human nature by keeping an eagle eye on the wretched late ones when at last they do slink in. Don't you know'—he turned to Lady John—'that look of half-resentful interest?'

'Perfectly. Every one wants to see whether these particular culprits wear their rue with a difference.'

'Or whether,' Borrodaile went on, 'whether, like the majority, they merely look abject and flustered, and whisper agitated lies. Personally I have known it to be the most interesting moment of the evening.'

What brought Mrs. Fox-Moore's plight forcibly home to Mrs. Freddy was seeing Vida leave her own animated group to join her sister. Mrs. Freddy made her way across the room, stopping a moment to say to Freddy as she passed—

'Do go and make conversation to Lady Whyteleafe.'

'Which is Lady Whyteleafe?' drawled Freddy.

'Oh, you always forget her! What am I to do with you? She's the woman with the pearls.'

'Not that cross-looking——'

'Sh! Yes, darling, that's the one. She's only looking like that because you aren't talking to her;' and Mrs. Freddy overtook Vida just as she reached the Desert Island where Mrs. Fox-Moore stood, looking seaward for a sail.

A few moments later, after ringing for dinner, Mrs. Freddy paused an instant, taking in the fact that Lady Whyteleafe hadn't been made as happy by Mr. Tunbridge's attentions as his wife had prophesied. No, the angry woman with the pearls, so far from being intent upon Freddy's remarks, was levelling at Mrs. Freddy the critical eye that says, 'Now I shall see if I can determine just how miserably conscious you are that dinner's unpardonably late, everybody starving, and since you've only just rung, that you have at least eight minutes still to fill up before you'll hear that you are "served."' Lady Whyteleafe leaned against the back of the little periwinkle damask sofa, and waited to see Mrs. Freddy carry off these last minutes of suspense by an affectation of great good spirits.

But the lady under the social microscope knew a trick worth two of that. She could turn more than one mishap to account.

'Oh, Freddy! Oh, Lady Whyteleafe! I've just gone and said the most awful, dreadful, appalling thing! Oh, I should like to creep under the sofa and die!'

'What's up?' demanded Mr. Freddy, with an air of relief at being reinforced.

'I've been talking to Vida Levering and that funereal sister of hers.'

'Oh, Mrs. Fox-Moore!' said Lady Whyteleafe, obviously disappointed. 'She's a step-sister, isn't she?'

'Yes, yes. Oh, I wish she'd never stepped over my threshold!'

'Why?' said Mr. Freddy, sticking in his eyeglass.

'Don't, Freddy. Don't look at her. Oh, I wish I were dead!'

'What have you been doing? She looks as if she wished she were dead.'

'That's nothing. She always looks like that,' Lady Whyteleafe assured the pair.

'Yes, and she makes it a great favour to come. "I seldom go into society," she writes in her stiff little notes; and you're reminded that way, without her actually setting it down, that she devotes herself to good works.'

'Perhaps she doesn't know what else to do with all that money,' said the lady of the pearls.

'She hasn't got a penny piece.'

'Oh, is it all his? I thought the Leverings were rather well off.'

'Yes, but the money came through the second wife, Vida's mother. Oh, I hate that Fox-Moore woman!' Mrs. Freddy laughed ruefully. 'And I'm sure her husband is a great deal too good for her. But how could I have done it!'

'You haven't told us yet.'

'They asked me who was late, and I said Dick Farnborough, and that I hoped he hadn't forgotten, for I had Hermione Heriot here on purpose to meet him. And I told Vida about the Heriots trying to marry Hermione to that old Colonel Redding.'

'Oh, can't they bring it off?' said Lady Whyteleafe.

'I've been afraid they would. "It's so dreadful," I said, "to see a fresh young girl tied to a worn-out old man."'

'Oh!' remarked Lady Whyteleafe, genuinely shocked. 'And you said that to——'

Mrs. Freddy nodded with melancholy significance. 'Even when Vida said, "It seems to do well enough sometimes," still I never never remembered the Fox-Moore story! And I went on about it being a miracle when it turned out even tolerably—and, oh, Heaven forgive me! I grew eloquent!'

'It's your passion for making speeches,' said Mr. Freddy.

At which, accountably to Lady Whyteleafe, Mrs. Freddy blushed and stumbled in this particular 'speech.'

'I know, I know,' she said, carrying it off with an air of comic contrition. 'I even said, "There's a modesty in nature that it isn't wise to overstep" (I'd forgotten some people think speech-making comes under that head). "It's been realized," I said—yes, rushing on my doom!—"it's been realized up to now only in the usual one-sided way—discouraging boys from marrying women old enough to be their mothers. But dear, blundering, fatuous man"'—she smiled into her husband's pleasantly mocking face—'"he thinks," I said, "at any age he's a fit mate for a fresh young creature in her teens. If they only knew—the dreadful old ogres!" Yes, I said that. I piled it on—oh, I stuck at nothing! "The men think an ugly old woman monopolizes all the opportunities humanity offers for repulsiveness. But there's nothing on the face of the earth as hideous," I said, "as an ugly old man. Doesn't it stand to reason? He's bound to go greater lengths than any woman can aspire to. There's more of him to be ugly, isn't there? I appealed to them—everything about him is bigger, coarser—he's much less human," says I, "and much more like a dreadful old monkey." I raised my wretched eyes, and there, not three feet away, was the aged husband of the Fox-Moore woman ogling Hermione Heriot! Oh, let me die!' Mrs. Freddy leaned against the blue-grey sofa for a moment and half closed her pretty eyes. The next instant she was running gaily across the room to welcome Richard Farnborough and Captain Beeching.

'I always know,' said Lord Borrodaile, glancing over the banisters as he and Vida went down—'I always know the kind of party it's going to be when I see—certain people. Don't you?'

'I know who you mean,' Vida whispered back, her eyes on Mrs. Graham Townley's aggressively high-piled hair towering over the bald pate of the minister, as, side by side, they disappeared through the dining-room door. 'Why does Laura have her?'

'Well, she's immensely intelligent, they say,' he sighed.

'That's why I wonder,' laughed Vida. 'We are rather frivolous, I'm afraid.'

'To tell the truth, I wondered, too. I even sounded my sister-in-law.'

'Well?'

'She said it was her Day of Reckoning. "I never ask the woman," she said, "except to a scratch party like this."'

'"Scratch party"—with you and me here!'

'Ah, we are the leaven. We make the compound possible.'

'Still, I don't think she ought to call it "scratch" when she's got an Ambassador and a Cabinet Minister——'

'Just the party to ask a scratch Cabinet Minister to,' he insisted, stopping between the two cards inscribed respectively with their names. 'As for the Ambassador, he's an old friend of ours—knows his London well—knows we are the most tolerant society on the face of the earth.'

In spite of her companion's affectation of a smiling quarrelsomeness, Vida unfolded her table-napkin with the air of one looking forward to her tête-à-tête with the man who had brought her down. But Lord Borrodaile was a person most women liked talking to, and hardly had she begun to relish that combination in the man of careless pleasantry and pungent criticism, when Vida caught an agonized glance from her hostess, which said plainly, 'Rescue the man on your right,'—and lo! Miss Levering became aware that already, before the poor jaded politician had swallowed his soup, Mrs. Townley had fallen to catechising him about the new Bill—a theme talked threadbare by newspaperdom and all political England. But Mrs. Townley, albeit not exactly old, was one of those old-fashioned women who take what used to be called 'an intelligent interest in politics.' You may pick her out in any drawing-room from the fact that politicians shun her like the plague. Rich, childless, lonely, with more wits than occupation, practically shelved at a time when her intellectual life is most alert—the Mrs. Townleys of the world do, it must be admitted, labour under the delusion that men fighting the battle of public life, go out to dine for the express purpose of telling the intelligent female 'all about it.' She is a staunch believer not so much in women's influence as in woman's. And there is no doubt in her mind which woman's. If among her smart relations who ask her to their houses and go to hers (from that sentiment of the solidarity of the family so powerful in English life), if amongst these she succeeds from time to time in inducing two or three public officials, or even private members, to prove how good a cook she keeps, she thinks she is exercising an influence on the politics of her time. Her form of conversation consists in plying her victim with questions. Not here one there one, to keep the ball rolling, but a steady and pitiless fire of 'Do you think?' and 'Why do you?'

Obedient to her hostess's wireless telegram, Miss Levering bent her head, and said to Mrs. Townley's neighbour—

'I know I ought not to talk to you till after the entrée.'

'Pray do!' said Sir William, with a sudden glint in his little eyes; and then with a burnt-child air of caution, 'Unless——' he began.

'Oh, you make conditions!' said Miss Levering, laughing.

'Only one. Promise not'—he lowered his voice—'promise not to say "Bill."'

'I won't even go so far as to say "William."'

He laughed as obligingly as though the jest had been a good one. A little ashamed, its maker hastened to leave it behind.

'There's nothing I should quite so much hate talking about as politics—saving your presence.'

'Ah!'

'I was thinking of something much more important.'

Even her rallying tone did not wholly reassure the poor man.

'More important?' he repeated.

'Yes; I long to know (and I long to be forgiven for asking), what Order that is you are wearing, and what you did to get it.'

Haycroft breathed freely. He talked for the next ten minutes about the bauble, making a humorous translation of its Latin 'posy,' and describing in the same vein the service to a foreign state that had won him the recognition. He wouldn't have worn the thing to-night except out of compliment to the ambassador from the Power in question. They were going on together to the reception at the Foreign Office. As to the Order, Haycroft seemed to feel he owed it to himself to smile at all such toys, but he did not disdain to amuse the pretty lady with the one in question, any more than being humane (and even genial sitting before Mrs. Freddy's menu), he would have refused to show the whirring wheels of his watch to a nice child. The two got on so well that the anxious look quite faded out of Mrs. Freddy's face, and she devoted herself gaily to the distinguished foreigner at her side. But Haycroft at a party was, like so many Englishmen, as the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin. The man Vida had rescued from Mrs. Graham Townley was, when in the society of women, so accustomed to seeing them take on themselves the onus of entertainment, was himself so unused to being at the smallest trouble, that when the 'Order' was exhausted, had Vida not invented another topic, there would have been an absolute cessation of all converse till Mrs. Graham Townley had again caught him up like a big reluctant fish on the hook of interrogation. At a reproachful aside from Lord Borrodaile, Miss Levering broke off in the middle of her second subject to substitute, 'But I am monopolizing you disgracefully,' and she half turned away from the eminent politician into whose slightly flushed face and humid eyes had come something like animation.

'Not at all. Not at all. Go on.'

'No, I've gone far enough. Do you realize that we left "Orders" and "Honours" half an hour ago, and ever since we've been talking scandal?'

'Criticizing life,' he amended—'a pursuit worthy of two philosophers.'

'I did it—' said the lady, with an air of half-amused discontent with herself; 'you know why I did it.'

He met her eye, and the faint motion that indicated the woman on his other side. 'Terrible person,' he whispered. 'She goes out to dine as a soldier goes into action.'

For the next few minutes they made common cause in heaping ridicule on 'the political woman.'

'But, after all'—Vida pulled herself up—'it may be only a case of sour grapes on my part. I'm afraid my conversation is inclined to be frivolous.'

He turned and gave her her reward—the feeling smile that says, 'Thank God!' But, strangely, it did not reflect itself in the woman's face. Something quite different there, lurking under the soft gaiety. Was it consciousness of this being the second time during the evening that she had employed the too common vaunt of the woman of that particular world? Did some ironic echo reach her of that same boast (often as mirthless and as pitiful as the painted smile on the cruder face), the 'I'm afraid I'm rather frivolous' of the well-to-do woman, whose frivolity—invaluable asset!—is beginning to show wear?

'Well, to return to our mutton,' he said; and, as his companion seemed suddenly to be overtaken by some unaccountable qualm, 'What a desert life would be,' he added encouragingly, 'if we couldn't talk to the discreet about the indiscreet.'

'I wonder if there wouldn't be still more oases in the desert,' she said idly, 'if there were a new law made——'

He glanced at her with veiled apprehension in the pause.

'You being so Liberal,' she went on with faint mockery, 'you're the very one to introduce the measure' (he shrank visibly, and seemed about to remind her of her pledge). 'It shall ordain,' she went on, 'that those who have found satisfactory husbands or wives are to rest content with their good fortune, and not be so greedy as to insist on having the children, too.'

'Oh!' His gravity relaxed.

'But, on the other hand, all the lonely women, the widows and spinsters, who haven't got anything else, they shall have the children.'

'I won't go so far as that,' he laughed, boundlessly relieved that the conversation was not taking the strenuous turn he for a moment feared. 'But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll support a measure that shall make an allowance of one child to every single woman the proper and accepted arrangement. No questions asked, and no disgrace.'

'Disgrace!' she echoed, smiling. 'On the contrary, it should be the woman's title to honour! She should be given a beautiful Order like yours for service to the State.'

'Ah, yes! But, what then would we talk about?'

She had turned away definitely this time.

'Well,' said Borrodaile, a little mocking, 'what is it?'

'I don't know,' she answered. 'I don't know what it is that seizes hold of me after I've been chattering like this for an hour or more.'

Borrodaile bent his head, and glanced past Vida to the abandoned minister.

'Console me by saying a slight weariness.'

'More like loathing.'

'Not of both your neighbours, I hope.'

He lost the low 'Of myself.' 'But there's one person,' she said, with something like enthusiasm—'one person that I respect and admire.'

'Oh!' He glanced about the board with an air of lazy interest. 'Which one?'

'I don't know her name. I mean the woman who dares to sit quite silent and eat her dinner without looking like a lost soul.'

'I've been saying you could do that.'

She shook her head. 'No, I've been engaged for the last hour in proving I haven't the courage. It's just come over me,' she said, her eyes in their turn making a tour of the table, and coming back to Borrodaile with the look of having caught up a bran-new topic on the way—'it's just come over me, what we're all doing.'

'Are we all doing the same thing?'

'All the men are doing one thing. And all the women another.'

His idly curious look travelled up and down, and returned to her unenlightened.

'All the women,' she said, 'are trying with might and main to amuse the men, and all the men are more or less permitting the women to succeed.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, laughing, 'to hear of your being so over-worked.'

'Oh, you make it easy. And yet'—she caught the gratitude away from her voice—'I suppose I should have said something like that, even if I'd been talking to my other neighbour.'

Borrodaile's look went again from one couple to another, for, as usual in England, the talk was all tête-à-tête. The result of his inspection seemed not to lend itself to her mood.

'I can't speak for others, but for myself, I'm always conscious of wanting to be agreeable when I'm with you. I'm sorry'—he was speaking in the usual half-genial, half-jeering tone—'very sorry, if I succeed so ill.'

'I've already admitted that with me you succeed to admiration. But you only try because it's easy.'

'Oh!' he laughed.

'You rather like talking to me, you know. Now, can you lay your hand on your heart——'

'And deny it? Never!'

'Can you lay your hand on your heart, and say you've tried as hard to entertain your other neighbour as I have to keep mine going?'

'Ah, well, we men aren't as good at it. After all, it's rather the woman's "part," isn't it?'

'The art of pleasing? I suppose it is—but it's rather a Geisha view of life, don't you think?'

'Not at all; rightly viewed, it's a woman's privilege—her natural function.'

'Then the brutes are nobler than we.'

Wondering, he glanced at her. The face was wholly reassuring, but he said, with a faint uneasiness—

'If it weren't you, I'd say that sounds a little bitter.'

'Oh, no,' she laughed. 'I was only thinking about the lion's mane and the male bird's crest, and what the natural history bores say they're for.'