"I'll tell you who'll be there--Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs.

Trent--do you know her? Spanish looking, and's divorced two husbands, and's called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red--Sally Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley."

"Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?"

"The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly a piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see--you know the sort!

the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species--she has it adapted for her.

Of course it's Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get back all that's been taken out in her acting. Young America's crazy about her.

She's going to play over here."

"Oh!"

Lady Holme's voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there, seated tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress.

The band was playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which divides the great dining-room from the court, and several people were dotted about waiting for friends, or simply killing time by indulging curiosity. Among them was a large, broad-shouldered young man, with a round face, contemptuous blue eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting lips. He was well dressed, but there was a touch of horseyness in the cut of his trousers, the arrangement of his tie. He sat close to the band, tipping his green chair backwards and smoking a cigarette.

As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by Lady Manby.

Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most of her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had a day's illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all intellectual, clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent swimmer. She had been all over the world with her husband, who was very handsome and almost idiotic, and who could not have told you what the Taj was, whether Thebes was in Egypt or India, or what was the difference, if any, between the Golden Gate and the Golden Horn.

Mrs. Trent was large, sultry, well-informed and supercilious; had the lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her figure was magnificent, and she prided herself on having a masculine intellect. Her enemies said that she had a more than masculine temper.

Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot, her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats, of field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of common soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously at work on women's tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours, the bench for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its grotesque travesties of passionate conviction--lies with their wigs on--the world political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism.

A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed to her the most delightfully ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had once been obliged to make a convulsive exit from an English cathedral, in which one hundred colonial bishops were singing a solemn hymn, entirely devastated by the laughter waked in her by this most sacred spectacle.

Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin, badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been on various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as a man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting, and her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent liars who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.

"I know I'm late," she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her shaggy little head. "I know I've kept you all waiting. Pardon!"

"Indeed you haven't," replied Mrs. Wolfstein. "Pimpernel Schley isn't here yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she'll turn up last."

Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment.

She generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with women.

Another ten minutes passed.

"I'm famishing," said Sally Perceval. "I've been at the Bath Club diving, and I do so want my grub. Let's skip in."

"It really is too bad--oh, here she comes!" said Mrs. Wolfstein.

Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which a demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man with the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and the waiters standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round, whispered, and smiled quickly before gliding off to their different little tables.

Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining, straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious innocence on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin tucked well in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her arms hung down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan.

She wore no gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small fingers, the rosy nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew near to Mrs. Wolfstein's party she walked slower and slower, as if she felt that she was arriving at a destination much too soon.

Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that piercing scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a spear, towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter, more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was lighter. The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was certainly a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too, and--

Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women gathered there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in appearance.

As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.

Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her eyes from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said, in a drawling and infantine voice:

"I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I wouldn't have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I would not."

It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a lady's voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become articulate.

Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of whom, it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the vestal virgin air, and said, "Glad to know you!" to each in turn without looking at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.

Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between her and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men who could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two or three of them--probably up from Sandhurst--had already assumed expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully fatuous, as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older men were more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein's guests.

And all the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme's hat.

Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:

"Did you see that article in the _Daily Mail_ this morning?"

"Which one?"

"On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be taught would be happiness."

"Who's going to be the teacher?"

"Some man. I forget the name."

"A man!" said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. "Why, men are always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can't deprive us of at a minute's notice. A man is the last two-legged thing to be a happiness teacher."

"Whom would you have then?" said Lady Cardington.

"Nobody, or a child."

"Of which sex?" said Mrs. Wolfstein.

"The sex of a child," replied Mrs. Trent.

Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.

"I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in--" she began.

"I was not alluding to Curzon Street children," observed Mrs. Trent, interrupting. "When I speak in general terms of anything I always except London."

"Why?" said Sally Perceval.

"Because it's no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the truth of things than you are, Sally."

"But, my dear, you surely aren't a belated follower of Tolstoi!" cried Mrs. Wolfstein. "You don't want us all to live like day labourers."

"I don't want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught it must not be by a man or by a Londoner."

"I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity," said Mrs.

Wolfstein. "But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle."

"Subtle people are delicious," said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on one side. "They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her, when she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne, and looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them."