She broke off and looked about the room. Robin Pierce glanced round too over the chattering guests sitting or standing in easy or lazy postures, smiling vaguely, or looking grave and indifferent. Mrs. Wolfstein was laughing, and yawned suddenly in the midst of her mirth. Lady Cardington said something apparently tragic, to Mr. Bry, who was polishing his eyeglass and pouting out his dewy lips. Sir Donald Ulford, wandering round the walls, was examining the pictures upon them. Lady Manby, a woman with a pyramid of brown hair and an aggressively flat back, was telling a story. Evidently it was a comic history of disaster. Her gestures were full of deliberate exaggeration, and she appeared to be impersonating by turns two or three different people, each of whom had a perfectly ridiculous personality. Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter. His big bass voice vibrated through the room. Suddenly Lady Holme laughed too.

"Why are you laughing?" Robin Pierce asked rather harshly. "You didn't hear what Lady Manby said."

"No, but Fritz is so infectious. I believe there are laughter microbes.

What a noise he makes! It's really a scandal."

And she laughed again joyously.

"You don't know much about women if you think any story of Lady Manby's is necessary, to prompt my mirth. Poor dear old Fritz is quite enough.

There he goes again!"

Robin Pierce began to look stiff with constraint, and just then Sir Donald Ulford, in his progress round the walls, reached the sofa where they were sitting.

"You are very fortunate to possess this Cuyp, Lady Holme," he said in a voice from which all resonance had long ago departed.

"Alas, Sir Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot, and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther and make cow-fights the national pastime. I hate cows frankly."

Sir Donald sat down in an armchair and looked, with his faded blue eyes, into the eyes of his hostess. His drawn yellow face was melancholy, like the face of one who had long been an invalid. People who knew him well, however, said there was nothing the matter with him, and that his appearance had not altered during the last twenty years.

"You can hate nothing beautiful," he said with a sort of hollow assurance.

"I think cows hideous."

"Cuyp's?"

"All cows. You've never had one running after you."

She took up her gloves, which she had laid down on the table beside her, and began to pull them gently through her fingers. Both Sir Donald and Robin looked at her hands, which were not only beautiful in shape but extraordinarily intelligent in their movements. Whatever they did they did well, without hesitation or bungling. Nobody had ever seen them tremble.

"Do you consider that anything that can be dangerous for a moment must be hideous for ever?" asked Sir Donald, after a slight pause.

"I'm sure I don't know. But I truly think cows hideous--I truly do."

"Don't put on your gloves," exclaimed Robin at this moment.

Sir Donald glanced at him and said:

"Thank you."

"Why not?" said Lady Holme.

It was obvious to both men that there was no need to answer her question. She laid the gloves in her lap, smoothed them with her small fingers, and kept silence. Silence was characteristic of her. When she was in society she sometimes sat quite calmly and composedly without uttering a word. After watching her for a minute or two, Sir Donald said:

"You must know Venice very well and understand it completely."

"Oh, I've been there, of course."

"Recently?"

"Not so very long ago. After my marriage Fritz took me all over Europe."

"And you loved Venice."

Sir Donald did not ask a question, he made a statement.

"No. It didn't agree with me. It depressed me. We were there in the mosquito season."

"What has that to do with it?"

"My dear Sir Donald, if you'd ever had a hole in your net you'd know.

I made Fritz take me away after two days, and I've never been back. I don't want to have my one beauty ruined."

Sir Donald did not pay the reasonable compliment. He only stretched out his lean hands over his knees, and said:

"Venice is the only ideal city in Europe."

"You forget Paris."

"Paris!" said Sir Donald. "Paris is a suburb of London and New York.

Paris is no longer the city of light, but the city of pornography and dressmakers."

"Well, I don't know exactly what pornography is--unless it's some new process for taking snapshots. But I do know what gowns are, and I love Paris. The Venice shops are failures and the Venice mosquitoes are successes, and I hate Venice."

An expression of lemon-coloured amazement appeared upon Sir Donald's face, and he glanced at Robin Pierce as if requesting the answer to a riddle. Robin looked rather as if he were enjoying himself, but the puzzled melancholy grew deeper on Sir Donald's face. With the air of a man determined to reassure his mind upon some matter, however, he spoke again.

"You visited the European capitals?" he said.

"Yes, all of them."

"Constantinople?"

"Terrible place! Dogs, dogs, nothing but dogs."

"Did you like Petersburg?"

"No, I couldn't bear it. I caught cold there."

"And that was why you hated it?"

"Yes. I went out one night with Fritz on the Neva to hear a woman in a boat singing--a peasant girl with high cheek-bones--and I caught a frightful chill."

"Ah!" said Sir Donald. "What was the song? I know a good many of the Northern peasant songs."

Suddenly Lady Holme got up, letting her gloves fall to the ground.

"I'll sing it to you," she said.

Robin Pierce touched her arm.