"And lots of people don't," said Mrs. Wolfstein.

"The vices are divinely comic," continued Lady Manby, looking every moment more like a teapot. "I think it's such a mercy. Fancy what a lot of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!"

Lady Cardington looked shocked.

"The virtues are often more comic than the vices," said Mrs. Trent, with calm authority. "Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good farces whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the wicked world."

"I didn't know anyone called respectability a virtue," cried Sally Perceval.

"Oh, all the English do in their hearts," said Mrs. Wolfstein.

"Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?"

Miss Schley was eating _sole a la Colbert_ with her eyes on her plate.

She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.

"We're pretty respectable over in America, I suppose," she drawled. "Why not? What harm does it do anyway?"

"Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is strictly respectable life is plain sailing."

"Oh, life is never that," said Mrs. Trent, "for women."

Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.

"Never, never," she said in her curious voice--a voice in which tears seemed for ever to be lingering. "We women are always near the rocks."

"Or on them," said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands she had divorced.

"I like a good shipwreck," exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice.

"I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show their mettle."

"It's always dangerous to speak figuratively if she's anywhere about,"

murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. "She'll talk about lowering boats and life-preservers now till the end of lunch."

Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect created in the room by the actress's presence in it. The magic of a name flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last weeks for the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she had come their interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for ingeniously tricking Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered her very piquant, and this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously vestal appearance.

Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly, as she glanced from one little table to another at the observant, whispering men.

She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for resembling her in another respect--capacity for remaining calmly silent in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.

"Will she?" she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.

"Yes. If she'd never been shipwrecked she'd have been almost entertaining, but--there's Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your attention."

"Where?"

She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed very bored. Sir Donald bowed.

"Who is that with him?" asked Lady Holme.

"I don't know," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "He looks like a Cupid who's been through Sandow's school. He oughtn't to wear anything but wings."

"It's Sir Donald's son, Leo," said Lady Cardington.

Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.

"Leo Ulford's a blackguard," observed Mrs. Trent. "And when a fair man's a blackguard he's much more dangerous than a dark man."

All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.

"He's good-looking," said Sally Perceval. "But I always distrust cherubic people. They're bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn't he married?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Trent. "He married a deaf heiress."

"Intelligent of him!" remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. "I always wish I'd married a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees not only all there is to see, but all there isn't. Sir Donald and his Cupid son don't seem to have much to say to one another."

"Oh, don't you know that family affection's the dumbest thing on earth?"

said Mrs. Trent.

"Too deep for speech," said Lady Manby. "I love to see fathers and sons together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons older. It's the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West African climate breeds fever."

"I know the whole of the West African coast by heart," declared Miss Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her knives and forks. "And I never caught anything there."

"Not even a husband," murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.

"In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,"

continued Miss Burns. "But there my mind was occupied. I was studying the habits of alligators."

"They're very bad, aren't they?" asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest inquiry.

"I prefer to study the habits of men," said Sally Perceval, who was always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who admired her swimming feats.

"Men are very disappointing, I think," observed Mrs. Trent. "They are like a lot of beads all threaded on one string."

"And what's the string?" asked Sally Perceval.

"Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the little arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it with a wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence.

He does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without one."

"And the worst of it is that he is adored," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "Look at my passion for Henry."

They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss Burns, who was--so she said--a spinster by conviction not by necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.

Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her, asked her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she lifted her pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:

"I've got no husband and never had one, so I guess I'm no kind of a judge."

"I guess she's a judge of other women's husbands, though," said Mrs.

Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. "That child is going to devastate London."