She must speak to Lord Henry. He would know how to direct her.

A sound in the room disturbed her meditations. Leonetta, having concluded a further examination of the Paris fashions, had tossed the paper on to the table.

"Peachy darling," she began, with slow deliberation. "May I have a friend to stay with me?"

Mrs. Delarayne continued to gaze into the street. She did not like being called Peachy. She had an indistinct feeling that it sounded vulgar,--why she would have been unable to explain. Nevertheless, since anything was preferable to being called "Mother" at the top of Leonetta's strident soprano in the public highway, and for some reason or other Leonetta would not make use of the name "Edith," she felt that it would perhaps be diplomatic to say nothing.

"Who is she?" she enquired cautiously.

Leonetta was silent for a moment. It was not the question, but the caution that dictated it, that struck the girl as strange.

"Isn't it enough that she is a friend of mine?" she observed.

"Quite, of course!" Mrs. Delarayne hastened to reply. "I only meant,--what is her name, who are her people?"

"Vanessa Vollenberg," answered Leonetta.

"It sounds foreign," was the mother's quiet comment.

"As a matter of fact, it is."

"It sounds a little Jewish."

"She is a Jewess," Leonetta admitted.

Mrs. Delarayne purred approvingly over her remarkable display of insight.

"She's very beautiful and wonderfully clever," Leonetta pursued.

"How old?"

"A year older than I am,--eighteen and a half."

"Jewesses are always pretty at that age," Mrs. Delarayne muttered, glancing at her daughter furtively for a moment.

"Oh yes, I know," Leonetta replied with unexpected warmth; "and they fade quickly afterwards. That's what everybody says."

It was clear that for some obscure reasons, she was very much attached to Vanessa Vollenberg.

"But Mrs. Vollenberg," she continued, "is the most beautiful woman in the world. She has been painted by every great artist in Europe. So she can't have faded much."

"How long do you want Vanessa to stay?"

Leonetta suggested that her friend might go to Brineweald with them for a fortnight; Mrs. Delarayne said that it might be three weeks if she chose, and the girl bounded towards her mother and embraced her.

"Oh Peachy, my own Peachy,--that is sweet of you," she exclaimed, "you are forgiven for not coming to the Claude hag to-morrow."

One of the points in Cleopatra's nature that greatly endeared her to her parent, was that she scarcely ever kissed, and when she did so, it was delicately, with a respectful consideration for her mother's facial toilet. Moreover, she never, in any circumstances, disarranged her mother's hair.

"Are they well off?" Mrs. Delarayne asked, easing a ringlet of hair tenderly back into its position near her ear.

"If you mean the Vollenbergs," Leonetta answered, "they're as rich as you and Sir Joseph knocked into one."

Her mother protested.

"Oh, very well. He owns a whole quarter of Hull, and has a West Indian Copra business into the bargain."

Leonetta did not know what "copra" was, but she thought it sounded sufficiently like a precious metal to suggest immense wealth.

Later in the evening, Mrs. Delarayne and Cleopatra were alone in the former's bedroom.

"I have a feeling," Cleopatra was saying, "that I don't love Denis sufficiently to go mad about him. You know what I mean: he may be the best specimen of manhood who has ever crossed this threshold, but he does not electrify me."

"That's very sound," her mother rejoined with unusual emphasis. "There's no need to be electrified by the man one marries."

"Yes, but I feel that one ought,--I mean that seeing that I could,--you know,--if one is going to be something to a man, one feels that one would like to be electrified by him."

Mrs. Delarayne deposited her voluminous transformation lovingly upon the dressing-table,--Cleo was such an intimate friend!

"Rubbish!" she ejaculated. "Romantic rubbish! How often have I told you girls that provided a man can keep you in comfort and has a clean sweet mouth, it doesn't matter a rap about anything else. Even if he has dirty hands and finger-nails in addition, it doesn't signify;--there's the English Channel and the Atlantic close by to wash them in. But if he hasn't a clean, sweet mouth, a second deluge wouldn't wash it for him.

How can you attach so much importance to trifles, when in Denis you have the two first prerequisites in an eminent degree? You are romantic, my dear Cleo. And matrimony is a matter of flesh and blood. When the demands of these are properly attended to, I assure you the rest is mere foolishness. Denis can keep you in comfort, and he has the teeth of an African negro. What more can you want? You cannot go on losing chance after chance through these romantic notions."

"But surely," Cleo objected hopelessly, "a man ought to fire you with something more exciting than the consideration of his means and his dentition!"

"In our class," Mrs. Delarayne rejoined with gravity, "men no longer set fire to anything. Get that out of your mind at once. Modern English civilisation has entirely failed to produce men who can be at once gentlemen and fiery lovers. We have wanted things both ways, and that is why we have failed. We have wanted nice clean-minded men with whom we could walk, talk, and play games freely. But that means men who can exercise self-control. Now, of course, we are certainly free to enjoy men as safe playmates all through our youth; but we are, I'm afraid, also free to be bored with them as husbands for the rest of our lives."

CHAPTER VI

There are many people who would have considered Mrs. Delarayne a selfish mother. Despite the fact that no man, woman, or child has ever yet been known to perform an unselfish action, the superstition still holds ground, that "selfish" and "unselfish" are two different and possible descriptions of human life and action. Believing, as we do, however, that no intellectually honest man can any longer attach any significance to these words, it cannot be admitted in these pages that Mrs. Delarayne was selfish. Neither was she at all conscious of any evil impulses when, standing at the dining-room window on her "Inner Light" afternoon, she watched her two children leave the house on their way to the "Claude hag," as Leonetta called the lady. On the contrary, she felt wonderfully free, exceptionally happy, profoundly relieved. The big house was silent. She was alone. She even had to suppress the half-formed longing that it might always be so.

She knew that Cleopatra felt no deep sympathy with any part of the "Inner Light" doctrine, and she was convinced, before enquiring, that Leonetta would sympathise with it even less. Although, therefore, she expected a number of young men that afternoon,--Lord Henry, St. Maur, and Malster, among them,--who might have interested her daughters, she was not in the least conscious of having acted with deliberate hostility in arranging so neatly that they should be out of the house when these gentlemen came.

To explain precisely what the "Inner Light" meetings meant to Mrs.

Delarayne would entail such a long discussion of the relation of women's religiosity in general to sex and to self-deception, that it would require almost the compass of another independent treatise to deal with it adequately.

In a word Mrs. Delarayne suffered, as a large number of modern women suffer, from receiving no sure and reliable guidance from men. As a widow this was, of course, incidental to her position; but she knew well enough that there were thousands who still had their husbands, who were no better off than she was. In addition to this, she had succumbed to the influence of that absurd belief, so prevalent in cultivated circles, that typical modern thought is superior to Christianity.

She felt the ease and peace of mind that resulted from having a belief of some sort; but she would have regarded it as a surrender of principle to return to Christianity; and, far from suspecting that most modern thought, as manifested in the doctrine of the "Inner Light," for instance, or Theosophy, or Christian Science, is inferior to Christianity, she had become a member of the Inner Light, and paid its heavy entrance fee of fifty guineas, with a feeling of deep pride and satisfaction.

The doctrine of the Inner Light was an importation from America. It had been introduced into England by a very intelligent, very tall, but very delicate looking Virginian lady, about fifteen years before this story opens. It had not spread very much, it is true,--its total number of members in Great Britain amounted only to two thousand five hundred; but it was all the more select on that account, and it was guaranteed by its founders and by all who belonged to it, to be entirely free from those "regrettable remnants of superstition which so very much marred the beauty of the older religions."

It professed to recognise only one purifying and creative agent in life, and that was Light. "The world was all darkness and death," said the first prophet of the "Inner Light,"--an American named Adolf Albernspiel, who had died worth half a million dollars,--"and then Light appeared, and with it Life and the great lucid Powers: Thought, Spirit, Order."

It was so obviously superior to Christianity, it commended itself so cogently to the meanest intelligence, that the members of the "Inner Light," try how they might to exercise the tolerance which is universal to-day, could hardly refrain from a mild consciousness of superiority when they looked down upon other creeds.