*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77930 ***






[Illustration: Cover art]




  MOP FAIR

  Some Elegant Extracts from the Private
  Correspondence of Lady Viola Drumcree,
  the Fatherless Daughter of Feodorovna,
  Countess of Chertsey

  BY

  ARTHUR M. BINSTEAD

  Otherwise known as "PITCHER" of the Pink 'Un



  SANDS & CO.
  EDINBURGH: 13 BANK STREET
  LONDON: 23 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C,
  1905




"'Everyone does it,' is the excuse made by all.  Our public standard
of morality, our code of honour, our national pride, seem to be
gradually wiped out."

--THE LADY TATTON SYKES.


"The girl of the Twentieth Century, even if she smokes a cigarette
and talks slang, seems to me an infinitely more capable being than
her grandmother was."

--THE COUNTESS OF WARWICK.


"Many insects are in a state of maturity thirty minutes after their
birth, and at seventy minutes begin to put their grandsires through
their facings."

--ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS NOTE.




  EPISTLES


  FIRST
  SECOND
  THIRD
  FOURTH
  FIFTH
  SIXTH
  SEVENTH
  EIGHTH
  NINTH
  TENTH
  ELEVENTH
  TWELFTH




MOP FAIR



EPISTLE I

EATON SQUARE, Tuesday, _June_ 16_th._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

Yesterday was the nineteenth anniversary of my unhappy birth, and I
am going to open my heart to you chiefly because it was during that
white-violet epoch of innocence and virtue, the few days prior to my
being bundled off to the same continental boarding-school as
yourself, dear kid, that I remember some countrified wiseacre with
rather less reverence than all the rest for the holy tradition
beginning:

  "God bless the Squire and his relations
  And keep us in our proper stations"--

remarking that it didn't greatly matter _what_ companionships a girl
formed at a Swiss _pensionnat de demoiselles_ since her own
self-respect and her shame at the remembrance of the fun in the
dormitories would impel her to drop all such _participes criminis_
with electric promptitude on her return to England--a fatuous piece
of prophecy which our continued friendship flatly disproves.  So,
between you and me, dearest, I frankly admit that mine has been a
joyless birthday by reason of my impotent yearnings after that which
I have never known--paternal love; for I feel quite sure that I told
you on that interesting night when at the Foire au Pain d'Epices we
first tasted _créme de menthe_, I came into the world many years
before the Countess of Chertsey, my mother, entered into a
matrimonial alliance with Mr Cecil Contango, since when her social
obligations and engagements have been so numerous and engrossing that
she has never yet found time to tell me even my father's name.  In my
childhood I was alluded to merely as "Féo's Indiscretion," and as her
photographs of that day represent her as being extremely fascinating
and beautiful, it may even be that she herself got twisted in her
bookkeeping.  I have a vague remembrance of her coming to see me at
the tiny cottage at Harrow where I vegetated with Nurse Knapper, on
one Sunday afternoon when the trees were all yellow with laburnum and
the bushes all lavender with lilac, and most probably the tall,
military Romeo in the dark cutaway, who accompanied her, was He.  For
as my mother kissed me at parting, she turned to Romeo and said,
"Surely you can spare me an hour or so to-morrow to do a little
shopping for her?"; at which he shuddered dreadfully and gasped out,
"Me in the streets on a Monday in the daytime?  Féo, you must be mad!
Didn't I tell you coming down that if only Fortnum and Mason would
trust me for a couple of raised pies and a case of old brandy I
intended hiding in the crypt of St Paul's till the bookies had
forgotten all about the City and Surburban?"

I saw Romeo once again later in the year when I was dreadfully ill--I
had been many days delirious through drinking rain-water; not that
all delirium is incurred in that way, but country children commonly
romp until they can drink a rain-barrel dry, and--well, as Sarah says
in the song, "That was the ruin of me!"  When next I saw Féo (as I
have been trained ever since that period to address my dam; and
to-day I draw hush-money of her to call her "Sister!") it was not
Romeo who brought her down, but a spruce and elderly military buck
with a hot eye and a Ceylon breath, who obviously dyed his hair and
probably kept at least three different vintages of purple morning
mouth-wash on his dressing-table: the kind of man who involuntarily
rubs his hands together and waxes eloquently conversational on
entering the room in which the cloth is laid, and the red hock
glasses punctuate the cutlery at regular distances.  At setting eyes
on me (then six years old) he stroked my hair and, turning round,
kissed Féo, which struck me as a strangely odd proceeding, not
knowing, as I do to-day, that nothing more delights the elderly than
to be accused of paternity.

But why should I bore you, dear, with this melting tale of "my salad
days when I was green in judgment," as Cleopatra, Marc Antony's
Alexandrian daisy, observes; why inflict upon you these uninteresting
details of my girlhood--that flabby stage of existence in which one
is principally conscious of growing out of one's underclothes?  It
may give you some idea of my detestation for the beings with whom I
live in dependence and--then is my ink not wasted.

Yesterday was a day of storm and stress--for Féo.  For once the gods
on high Olympus heard my prayer and dealt "Cecil's little honey-bun"
as big a bit of retributive justice as she will digest in the next
six weeks.  It came about in this way.

Despite her unflagging efforts to keep him strictly to quarters,
Féo's polished, sin-worn, stockbroking old fragment is distinctly and
extravagantly flighty.  All girls of one-and-twenty look alike to
him; or, as the Saturday-to-Monday hussy said of the M.C. of the
seaside dancing-rooms, "he's a bit partickler, but not what you might
call nasty partickler."  From the Regent Street barmaid with the
yellow hair to the Dover Street cloak-model with the thirty-six bust
"All are Welcome."  And perhaps after all, the only people in the
world who are truly virtuous--the few remaining savages--are only so
because they do not know any better.  Poor things!  In any event Mr
Contango is an indecisive wobbler, as his cuffs constantly covered
with illegible addresses of unknown peeresses abundantly prove; and
yesterday morning one of the maids of the bedchamber brought to Féo a
telegram which she had found under Mr Contango's pillow.  It was a
hot bobsworth and had evidently been delivered to him at the club at
which he dined on the previous evening.  In the ardent language of
omnibus-love, it began by assuring the addressee of the sender's
constancy and devotion, and concluded by arranging a meeting for
"seven to-morrow under the clock at Charing Cross"--plebeian
Strephons being as incurably addicted to love-making "under the
clock" as patrician ones are under the table.

In an aggressive state of hysteria and tears, Féo burst into my
morning-room, but as the vapours are absurdly out of fashion and the
woman who is on the verge of flopping is worthy only of the most
pitying contempt--as, moreover, I had already laughed heartily over
the telegram with the maid who found it--I manifested no emotion.

"Read this, read this!" she hissed, thrusting the pink slip into my
hands.  "Am I--am I to believe my eyes?"

"A telegram can be repeated," I suggested, remembering the legend on
the back of the form, "at one-half the charge for transmission, any
fraction of one penny less than one half-penny being reckoned as one
halfpenny.  At the same time the Postmaster-General will not be
liable for any ----."

"Have you no pity for me, Viola?" she whined.  "Mr Contango has
forsaken me to go out girl-hunting."

"If so venerable a kernel, once encased in a prickly shuck--the
development of a towering spike-bloom--could arouse my compassion, I
should be compelled to lament the fact that I had become hopelessly
dippy," I replied, "but since your mental calibre is so low that you
choose to look after one man instead of being looked after by a
hundred, I must not deny you my counsel and assistance."

At this she blubbered afresh and kissing me on the forehead--ugh, how
I rubbed the spot with Piesse and Lubin later on!--she took my hand
in hers and cried:

"And you shall find me so grateful, child; for instance, to-morrow
you shall have that lovely chinchilla stole on which you set your
heart."

"Doesn't the granny muff go with it?" I asked with apparent
indifference.

"Y--yes, the muff as well," she stammered.

"Better put it down in black and white," I suggested, setting my
_écritoire_ before her.  Bargains driven with difficulty are too
often the last to be complied with.  "Now then," said I, as I folded
the voucher and locked it in my desk, "_quo vadis_, madame?  Are you
steering this craft with your heart or your head?  Is the philanderer
to be reclaimed in accordance with the rest of your belated theories,
or is he to be gaffed and subsequently landed in the Court in which
men and women are put asunder?  The first is the semi-colon, the
second is the climax."

"Vi, dear," she said, as I had all along foreseen she would do, "the
semi-colon, please."

"That means," I interpreted, barely succeeding in suppressing my
disgust, "that we include ourselves in the Charing Cross assignation.
Very good, I will be ready for you at half-past six;" and I left her.
Poor fool!  Small wonder that every nation in the world agreed upon
the point of woman's folly long, long ago; and what manner of
creature is this, that, finding herself disesteemed by her mate, buys
a love philtre and introduces it furtively into his evening beverage
to try and bring him back?  Pah!  Excuse me, dearest Pat, if I
abandon the subject--it overcomes me!

By half-past six Féo had cried herself hideous; nevertheless she was
dressed to go out, and, indeed, desired nothing more than to fall
upon the sinner's neck and weep afresh.  Possibly there are faults on
both sides--as the Southend shell-fishmonger said to the
bean-feasters when they complained that they couldn't keep his
pickled cockles down.  Possibly (again) I was wearing a more than
ordinarily militant expression as I stood there, for Féo next said,
with characteristic vacillancy:

"On reflection, child, I have decided to go alone.  A _confrontation_
of this kind is not a spectacle for your young eyes."

"And pray how are you going?" I asked, instantly perceiving the
manifest advantages of being there myself, unhampered and alone.

"The landaulette is already at the door," she said.  It, or some
other kind of car, invariably has been ever since she took to
introducing these things to her friends, and paying such of her debts
as no woman, however brazen, could continue to owe with complacency,
with the resultant "commissions."

"Just as I imagined!" I rejoined, with an acid sneer.  "And with
James and William in powder and smart liveries on the
box--'Royalty-visiting-Royalty' personified--I'll be bound!  A pretty
way indeed to play Paul Pry--hanged if I don't think you'd go
deerstalking accompanied by Sousa's band!  Oho! see, just across the
burn, yon big black stag feeding low down with five-and-twenty hinds:
will you kindly have the goodness to strike up _The Washington
Post-office_!  Really, Féo, you are almost too absurd for human
toleration.  No; you will go to the Embankment on the Underground,
and, turning up Villiers Street, will mount the wooden stairs and
enter Charing Cross station by the side door.  Six paces diagonally
to the left will give you a position from which you will command an
unobstructed view of the entire platform-approach from behind Smith's
bookstall: you will thus face the clock as well as every door by
which the guilty pair can enter.  So now, good-bye.  I am, by the
way, fiscally crippled till the end of the month; what sugar have
you?"

Helping myself to a few sovereigns from her proffered purse, I
dutifully kissed her hand and followed her to the hall doors, waiting
there--to the no small wonderment of the footmen--until I saw her
turn the corner into Belgrave Place, when I promptly slipped out also.

Being fortunate enough to pick out a really good hansom, I was
probably the first from _our_ stable to reach the battle-ground, and,
ensconcing myself behind an abutting corner of the Continental
Parcels Office, I endeavoured to decide in my own mind which of the
many casual Eves present was the other runner.  My ultimate fancy
rested between two.  The first of these was a tall blonde, in a
heel-tipping skirt and mess-jacket of blue herring-bone, with
torquoise velvet cuffs and _empiècements_ and gilt studs.  The
cab-man who set her down and received a bare shilling for his fare,
asked her--very kindly, I thought--if she really felt she could spare
it, at which she told him she would gladly have made it more, but she
had only a penny left, and might need that herself.  The second was a
decided brunette in a daring blending of pink chiffon and pale yellow
silk, worn with a mauve Tam-o'-Shanter with a gold quill, and
patent-leather boots with white cloth tops.  Omitting the white cloth
tops, she was the living ideal of the persecuted heroine of _Under
the Red Macintosh, or the Toque-Builder's Typewriter_, which, of
course, you remember quite well.  I often take it up, for there has
always seemed to me to be such a genuine touch of human nature about
"Gwendolyn's" landlady who was partial to a little drop of gin, and
used to drink it out of a footless egg-cup which she carried in her
reticule whilst tramping the streets with "Gwendoleyn" in search of
an honourable theatrical engagement, such as a lady could accept.

It was at two minutes past seven, or thereabouts, that Mr Contango
appeared.  He passed by the blonde in the blue herring-bone with the
wig-wag walk unnoticed, nor did he pay the least attention to
"Gwendoleyn" in the pink and yellow: you may well imagine my
surprise!  As he approached the bookstall--and there were so many
people about that my eyes followed him only with great
difficulty--blundering madly towards the spot where the warmest
panther in the Peerage lay crouching for a spring, there burst from
the swing doors of the Ladies' Cloak Room a tall, fair girl in grey,
her nostrils dilated, and her Rembrandt-red hair crowned by a black
beaver Toreador, with a pink vulture's pom-pom introduced jauntily on
the left side!  She saw Mr Contango, as she thought, departing, and
ran towards him; but while there still remained a good ten feet of
platform--and thrice ten solid strangers hurrying across it--between
herself and her lover, she suddenly arrested her progress as the
infuriated Féo dashed from her ambush, and, with a small but firm
gloved hand, gripped her lawful incubus by the right coat-sleeve!

"Pray, Mr Contango, what brings you here at this unusual hour?"

The coward quailed beneath her infuriated glare, and struggled as
fiercely as he dared without incurring public resentment, to wrench
his imprisoned arm free.  Féo, however, clung like a barnacle to a
ship's keel.  But she couldn't give the weight away.  His superior
avoirdupois enabled Mr Contango to tug her steadily through the
unsympathetic crowd, and, wilfully and deliberately--though Féo, poor
fool! did not realise it--into the route or pathway down which a
grimy railway-porter was pushing an iron-wheeled trolley, burdened
with two-score of sooty and malodorous carriage-lamps.

"My leave, please, my leave; mind 'er grease!" growled the fellow,
shoving the corners of the truck into the just and unjust alike.

A strange light shone in Mr Contango's eyes: it was a beam of
inspiration.  As the cumbrous hand-waggon with its glittering but
grimy cargo passed by him, he very adroitly wiped his right palm
along the oil-blacked tops of the lower tier of smoking lamps; then
closed that hand and kept it for a moment behind him.  Féo,
meanwhile, finding the pulling growing gradually more feeble,
fatuously imagined that the fish was spent, and getting out the
conversational gaff to despatch it, reiterated:

"Mr Contango, I demand to know where you were going?"

"Certainly, dearest.  Straight into the lavatory.  Just look at this,
as Serpolette says----" and he stuck out the paw that literally
reeked with oily blackness.

"Been shaking hands with one of your city friends, I presume?"
sneered Féo, stepping back to avoid contact with the paw, for, to do
her justice, Féo is always so daintily, unimpeachably turned out that
even the flies wipe their feet before alighting on her.

"Alas!" replied Mr Contango in a melodramatic way, espying an exit
from his dilemma, "there is one friend at least whose honest hand I
ne'er may grasp again--(here he improved his market by covering his
eyes with his hand, thereby transferring much soot to his face)--I
fly to his bedside now--now, er--by way of the lavatory.  Do not
further detain me, dear heart."

"I release you that you may perform your much-needed ablutions,"
stipulated Féo, loosening her grip, "but I still await you, and your
explanation, here.  Go, and return quickly;" and Mr Contango slunk
away as meanly as did Theseus when he gave poor Ariadne the slip on
the "front" at Naxos.

Down the stone steps went Mr Contango, and into the palatial marble
dungeon on whose atmosphere the all-pervading odour of scented-soap
has a firm half-Nelson, and whose echoing walls magnify the hiss of
the half-minute rushes of water into the roars of Niagaraic torrents.
At least that is how such an apartment was once described in the
report of an inquest upon a defaulting attendant who had committed
suicide on being told after the quarterly stocktaking that he was
two-hundred-and-fifty-four wash-up's, ten roller towels, and eight
gold fish short.

As he descended the stairs, Mr Contango's concernment was less for
his lawful than for his unlawful partner, but his lucidity returned
on the instant of his setting eyes on a middle-aged postman who was
dallying at the wash-basins, the traditional fidelity of the postman
being readily apparent to anyone who has looked over some of the
continental postcards which he, in spite of all temptations, has
faithfully surrendered to the addressees.  Therefore Mr Contango went
up at once to the postman and said:

"I have two little commissions for you to execute; they will not
occupy you more than five minutes, and the pay is one shilling a
minute.  First of all, go to the booking-office and purchase me a
first-single to some station a little way down the line; no matter
where.  Take this half-sovereign and bring me the change."

So the postman went.  He was an unconscionable time gone, the delay
mainly arising out of his ingenuous consideration for his employer's
pocket.  With praiseworthy economy he selected "Spa Road,
Bermondsey," at the ticket-window, and, as first-singles to that
fashionable promenade are seldom or never asked for at Charing Cross,
the booking-clerk had to fake one with a typewriter.  The joy of the
simple letter-carrier at having nine-and-sixpence to return in change
was so real, however, that Mr Contango checked his angry impatience,
and hurriedly proceeded to instruct the postman in his second errand.

"Upstairs, just over by the big slate on which they chalk up the
Channel weather report and the number of baggages on the Folkestone
boat," he said, "you will see a young lady--tall and fair, with
lavishly large brown eyes; wearing a grey frock, and a black hat with
a pink feather in it.  Hand her this card, and----ah, yes, here are
the five shillings I promised you;" and he placed in the postman's
hand the silver and one of his visiting cards, inscribed:--

  +------------------------------------------+
  |                                          |
  |  "_Fly.  Pray pardon this seeming but    |
  |  unintentional despotism, Queen of the   |
  |  Human Race, but_ PLEASE _fly: we are    |
  |  observed.  Will pick you up later on.   |
  |  You and you only, the entire time       |
  |  for_ CECIL."                            |
  |                                          |
  +------------------------------------------+

From half-way up the lavatory steps, with his keen eyes on a level
with the platform, Mr Contango watched the postman single out the
tall girl in grey, and deliver his message.  He saw her smile
sadly--tall women have not the vital force of little women--as she
turned to leave the station by the arched exit through which the cabs
pass, and, sticking the railway ticket conspicuously in his hatband
(an unusual proceeding, but a desirable one in the circumstances), he
sallied forth to rejoin his wife with as brave a show of unconcern as
ever a man returning to a life of irksome chastity carried.

"And now, dear Féo," he said blandly, as he rejoined the surmising
simpleton who was fully prepared to submit to a mild remonstrance on
the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, or
deplorable-pity-of-a-man-marrying-a-woman-who-never-
seems-to-understand-him lines, as the price of her victory, "is your
stirring little farce at an end, and am I to be permitted to smooth
the pillow of my poor friend who lies at the point of death at--at,
er--Tunbridge Wells?"

"Tunbridge Wells!" she echoed, half acquiescing only for the reason
that her brain was reeling at her utter inability to reconcile the
proposition to the telegram still in her pocket; "I presume that,
without an atom of luggage, you would return to-night?"

Strolling aimlessly across the station as they talked, they had by
this time reached the open door of the glaring refreshment-bar, and
as Mr Contango raised his eyes he caught an instantaneous reflection
in the oblong mirror, just ahead, of a group of three persons of
which he and his wife were but two.

The third was the faithful postman!

Straight up came the blundering idiot and roared as if into a
megaphone:

"I give the laidy the note as you wrote downstairs, sir, an' she said
All-right; she'll go straight up to Verrey's an' wait in the
restarong till you join her!"

* * * * * *

Féo and Mr Contango returned to Eaton Square in eloquent silence and
a four-wheeler, and ascended at once to their respective rooms to
sulk, Féo first going to the very nadir of narrow-minded littleness
by locking the street door and taking the key upstairs with
her--which proceeding on the part of a countess so shocked Andrews,
our head butler, that he handed Féo his portfolio when he passed the
matutinal mocha and the vesper rashers this morning.  How it will all
end I little know and care considerably less.  Quite possibly Féo
will once again act the upper and the nether millstone by the
essentially materialistic man who seems not to worry about little
inconsistencies so long as he leads the life dictated by the senses:
probably he will tardily give her his word of honour to leave undone
the things which he finds himself unable to do; also to be seen at
church between drinks on a Sunday.  The only certainty about these
squabbles is that, whenever this excessive hammering in of the old,
well-settled nail is going on, the burden of supporting existence in
the company of the two most morose and splenetic mortals in London
falls upon me.  How truly has Ben Jonson said, "Apes are apes, though
clothed in scarlet!"

Have you heard, by the way, what a fearfully narrow squeak dear Lady
Invernairne had the other day?  Her marriage to the middle-aged Earl
was, of course, a terrible error--though not in the sense intended by
the Parisian restaurateur whose consort's arithmetic as practised on
the customers' bills was so distinctly "against the consumer" that
Monsieur once assured one of his intimates, "Jules, mon vieux, I
would not take fifty thousand francs for the errors committed by
madame, my wife, this season alone!"  No, dear, it was a mistaken
business in the sense that while she was--and still is--positively
irresistible to any right-thinking bachelor in any part of
Christendom, he soon returned to his old life of club, and
race-meeting, and card table.  Naturally she has had to console
herself, and--well, the other day she was sitting at her tiny writing
table, penning a note that commenced with "My very naughty, but
delightful darling," and concluded with "Yours and yours alone, I
swear," when she became suddenly aware that the Earl had entered the
room and was standing immediately behind her, looking over her
shoulder, and doubtless reading sentences which were warm enough to
have caused growing wild flowers to droop their heads and wither.
Without an instant's hesitation she dipped her pen deep into the ink
pot, signed the letter in a bold hand "Jane Huggins," and arose with
the remark:

"There, that's done!  But who in the wide world could have foreseen
the domestic servant problem reaching the point of compelling a
Countess to write her illiterate, but in all other senses desirable,
parlour-maid's love-letters?"

From the Far East there returned yesterday, torn and seared,
Lieutenant Percy Brancaster, who a year or so ago was betrothed to
the Honourable Mrs Attie Alderney, the young Meredithian widow of his
once dearest chum--at least they were at Harrow together, and Attie
never set eyes on Percy without soundly punching his head, even if he
had to run a hundred yards to do it.  Percy, as you doubtless are
aware, was deeply in love with Phyllis Postance long before Attie
Alderney came along and took her, after which, poor thing! he was
like the solitary prisoner who had nothing to do and nowhere to go
when they took him out of the Bastille and destroyed it.  Having left
the Navy through a breach of regulation number
two-million-eight-hundred-and-ninety-seven, concerning the method of
parting the eyebrows across the top of the nose, he became imbued
with a somewhat Quixotic and reasonless desire to go and fight on
behalf of the little yellow Japs, but had no sooner arrived in the
Ping Yang Inlet on the Ta-Tong River than a Russian torpedo-boat
handed him the distressing injury which, I am told, disqualifies him
for any active service save the compilation of some such work of
personal observation as "With Neither Side in the Late War."  So
luckless a person, prematurely aged, his cheeks hollowed by long
suffering, his once golden-brown hair all etiolated and falling,
compels one's sympathy, yet one cannot quite blame Phyllis for
absolutely declining to receive, let alone resume courtship, with one
who as a husband would be completely incapable of ever making up any
little domestic disagreement which would be sure to arise from time
to time.  For when the torpedo exploded, so Phyllis tells me (and she
is an advanced student of Phrenology), it carried poor Mr
Brancaster's bump of forgiveness entirely away!  And yet we are
continually being told that the "horrors of war" are much overstated!

But my hand grows cramped, so, dearest, adios.

  Your affectionate friend,
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE II

EATON SQUARE, _Thursday, July_ 2_nd._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

For three very good reasons, each in itself sufficient, I am about to
tell you a profound secret.  Firstly, I feel quite sure that absolute
secrecy is completely impossible from you; comparative secrecy where
you are concerned, dear, is only a matter of degree; so that in a
week at most my news will be all over London; Secondly, I well know
how hopelessly remote my matrimonial prospects have seemed to you,
because everyone has told me how sympathetically you have stated your
views on the subject; Thirdly, I feel it my duty as an old
schoolfellow to rekindle the spark of expectancy in your own bosom by
imparting the news that there is now one girl the less to oppose you
in the marriage market--and though, dear, I would far rather see you
develop into a sour and parchment-skinned old maid than frighten you
into making a hasty and perhaps unhappy alliance, every competitor to
disappear from the betting should inspire new life in the poor crocks
still unprofitably swelling the handicap, and especially those whose
roses are beginning to look faded, and who are, broadly speaking,
becoming manifestly frayed and shop-worn.  Men, who are largely
optimists, tell us that marriage will never lose its popularity,
because if there were no marriages there would be no married women,
and if there were no married women, who would there be for the men to
make love to?  But we--I should of course, say you--know differently.
Fish will not rise at bait that has been on the hook time after time,
and girls lose their bloom by being slobbered and mauled by many
triflers.  In her translation of the dressing-room-guide of the
Baroness Staffe, Lady Colin Campbell flatly stated that much kissing
was extremely bad for the complexion, so though as you say--with
monotonous frequency, by the way--"we weren't doing a thing but
having a good time," it really was your trifler of the moment who
(according to his low-flash lights, poor booby!) was having the "good
time" and you who were "not doing a thing," I can feel for you.  At
the bottom of that lane lies the Discard, dear Patricia.

It was on the box seat of a regimental coach at Ascot, while Botfly
was delaying the start for the Wokingham Stakes, that I accepted a
proposal of marriage from Lord Evelyn Godolphin Mountprospect,
youngest son of the Earl of Atholbrose.  Being of our house party at
Mrs Mortimer-Toddpush's, at Wargrave, he had been addressing me in
rather wild superlatives all the week, but it was not until we sat
side by side upon the coach, and every head but his and mine was
turned towards where the delightful Botfly was playing the goat, that
Evelyn permitted his right arm to reconnoitre.  And Evelyn--my
Evelyn--is as _svelte_ and refined as his name suggests; personally,
I have no desire to be pursued and hugged by a hairy monster, and
Plato tells us how the early athlete goes to pieces.  Imagine the
loathsome lot, Patricia, of the unhappy girl united in holy matrimony
with an athlete who has unexpectedly gone to pieces!  Owing to the
exercise of influence in high quarters, Mrs Mortimer-Toddpush says,
Evelyn's military duties are considerably lightened, and consist
chiefly of writing the prologues and epilogues to the plays presented
by the dramatic club and showing the general's lady guests where to
wash their hands.  Contrast my Ascot, spent under these halcyon
conditions, with my only previous experience of a racecourse; when I
was driven down to Sandown Park by Mr Contango, who, being heavily in
debt to the Ring, had to get under the dogcart whenever a bookmaker
looked across the course!

Speaking of this terrible person moves me to relate to you an
adventure into which he precipitated Féo, poor wretch! only a week
ago.  Mr Contango's City affairs were, I may tell you, in a very
parlous state, and what he vulgarly terms the
"Carnegie-library-compound" was very scarce.  He had applied
frequently to Féo for one hundred pounds to keep his tailor quiet,
but as Féo had some months previously entrusted him with a similar
amount to pay a dressmaker's bill, and he had dishonestly expended it
in taking a ballet girl to Brighton--a positively dreadful creature
who, biting the wrong end of the asparagus at the table d'hôte (so
Noser's Detectives ascertained) cried to the waiter, "Hoy, cully,
these muddy bluebells aint half done!"--she very naturally declined.
Moreover, her health has of late been so indifferent as to have
soured her temper, and her physician despotically said that if she
did not go at once to a more genial climate, she would before long be
investigating the surprises of a future state.

Last Thursday, therefore, she and Mr Contango, followed by the
luggage brake piled high, set out for the Riviera, their destination
being Hyères, the sheltered little city which nestles beneath the
friendly Maurettes.  The train by which they proposed to travel was
the eleven o'clock first-class boat express from Victoria, but
scarcely had they entered that station and alighted from their
brougham than the unexpected--by Féo, anyway--happened.

Out from the refreshment buffet rushed two big men who pounced upon
Mr Contango and grabbed him by each arm.  One of them said something
about "handcuffs," but the other ruled it out as being unnecessary;
in less than twenty minutes they would be at Brixton, he said,
meanwhile if the prisoner resisted they could put him on the floor of
the cab and sit on him.  As Mr Contango did naught but roll his eyes
in misery and groan quite audibly, Féo had to interplead.

"What--what do you want of my husband?" she demanded.

The elder of the two men took a blue document from his breast pocket
and replied:

"Two hundred an' forty-one pound thirteen an' fourpence."

"And what for pray?" inquired Féo.

"Judment an' costs, Copthall _versus_ Contango--Stock Exchange
differences," answered the bailiff with an air almost of personal
resentment.

For a moment or so Féo gazed with scornful disgust at the wretch who
stood cowering between his captors.

"You shambling, sheep-faced exile from Hell!" she cried, "how much
more are you going to cost me?  Fade, fade, ye roses!  Is it for this
that----"

But the men cut her brutally short by saying it was high time they
were moving, as they had got to fetch "another one" from Kennington
before dinner; consequently Féo realised that it was up to her to get
busy with her little oblong grey-green cheque-book or let her consort
go--Inside!  Like the fool that she is, she couldn't bear to see him
buckled--indeed even as she gazed at him she was secretly longing to
throw her arms around him.  All intense natures quarrel with those
they adore.

"Where can I write a cheque?" she asked of the man with the warrant.

"Come into the bar, lady," replied the bailiff, and led the way.

"To whom shall I make it payable?"

"Flight and Dobell, ma'am, Serjeants-at-Mace to the Sheriffs of
London, at your service.  But it must be an open cheque to 'bearer,'
please, and my mate will remain with the gentleman while I fetch the
cash."

Féo certainly squirmed a little at the prospect of remaining in the
company of the bailiff and his prisoner while the tipstaff went to
Coutts's and returned, but there was no help for it; Mr Contango's
iron devotion to backsliding would assuredly land him in some fresh
muddle if he were left alone; meanwhile the eleven o'clock train had
passed on its way, and there was no other until nine that night.

"Please take a cab both ways," said Féo, as she handed her cheque and
a small gold coin to the officer, "and bid the driver not to spare
his cattle."

Never did ten minutes go so slowly; with the conventional
splitting-headache demanded by the occasion, Féo endeavoured to still
her nerves with tea in the buffet, but to no purpose.  Eventually the
man came back, grinning his satisfaction.

"Is this wretched business ended now, pray?"

"Quite, ma'am; everythink's all-Sir-Garnet," replied the bailiff, "of
course it's not perticklarly pleasant, but we've only done our duty
and I hope, ma'am--and you too, sir--will admit as we've not exceeded
it.  Should you do so, sir, this is our firm's address--pardon the
envelope but I haven't got a card about me.  Good day, ma'am, and
good day to you, sir:" and they departed.

Poor fool--if only she had known!  For the dirty grubby envelope
which Mr Contango instantly thrust into his pocket contained fresh
clean bank notes to the value of eighty pounds--Contango's "corner,"
or third share, in the most disgraceful conspiracy ever conceived to
victimise a wealthy wife.  Mr Contango had planned the whole thing.
The imaginary "bailiff" who spoke about the handcuffs is well known
in the neighbourhood of the Haymarket as Posh Peters, "the Panton
Street Plunger," while the counterfeit "tipstaff" who smashed the
cheque is a dog-fighting publican who runs a pothouse for sports
called "The Shepherd and Flock" in Golden Square--our retained
detective pointed him out to me on the course at Ascot; he was
dressed in a yellow suit with scarlet stripes, with a leather satchel
at his waist, and a mauve opera-hat on his head; he was standing on
an upturned wine-box and bellowing, "This an' the next!  The old
firm!  This an' the next!"

Yet Féo has forgiven all.  A blubbered promise to sin no more, and a
written first-charge on the stock of a brace of Kentish coal-mines as
innocent of the possession of a scrap of inflammable fossil as a
pickled onion, have more than made peace, and Féo and her Cecil are
slowly stewing in the balsamic sunshine in the tropical gardens of
the Hotel des Palmiers at Hyères.

By this mention of "the proscenium of the Riviera" I am reminded, by
the way, that, walking down Bond Street the other afternoon, I
encountered Gertrude Viney, now a confirmed invalid through sheer
worry.  In good health, however, she was always a trifle too florid,
so that she really looks awfully well when in fact she is dreadfully
ill.  As I daresay you remember, dear, she went, about eighteen
months ago, to stay with a married sister during a certain
interesting period, and became so hopelessly involved with her own
brother-in-law that the young mamma on her first day out, drove
straight to her solicitor and had a petition put on the file.  The
decree nisi which resulted was made absolute only in April, the
erring Gordon Peter and Gertrude being united the self-same
afternoon.  But now come the complications.  Muriel proves to be in a
rapid decline and as her death alone would bring the happy pair
within the operative scope of the Deceased Wife's Sister's Bill--this
on the word of folks, male and female, married and single, "wives,
widows, or whatnots," as the Woman's Suffrage orator put it--they are
nursing her assiduously, and are about to give a bill-of-sale on
their guilty home in order to raise sufficient funds to give the
wronged woman the full course of the celebrated curds-and-whey cure
at Hyères.  Experiencing the divine afflatus at times, poor Gertrude
has put her life's romance into a poem, an autographed copy of which
she gave me, and which I would, in turn, put before the whole world
were it not for the fact that it seems rank sacrilege to place such
pretty penmanship in the soiled hands of the practical printer.  You
may form an opinion of its beautiful sentiment, however, from the
opening lines:

  "As Gordon dried my tears which flowed with unabated force,
  Up in the lift our lawyer rode to hand us our divorce."


Most earnestly do I hope that no black and untoward event may mar
their happiness, since it really is a most desirable alliance for
Gertrude, Gordon Peter coming of a fearfully old and original
Scottish family--so old, in fact, that it was his direct ancestor who
died of shellfish-poisoning through eating the identical mussel that
Musselburgh was named after.  But before I write another line I must
turn aside to tell you of the despicable way in which Lord
Invernairne rang the bell on poor Lavinia over the trifling "Jane
Huggins" deception of which I made mention in my last.

The elderly rake, most of whose amours are even less pretentious than
were those of Zeus himself, has long been suspected by Lavinia of
pursuing the beautiful in the shape of a certain hourglass-figured
Maddox Street frock-hitcher--(the earlier vulgate had it "little
milliner," which, through gradations of "showroom sideshrine," "Busy
Lizzie the teagown model," and "Miss Never-never of the night rails,"
has subsided to "frock-hitcher"; though, bless your heart, what's in
a name, as the little Kaffir boy observed when he explained to the
missionary that he was called "Two for Tuppence" partly because he
was a twin, and partly because his father was, from his mother's
account, by no means a rich man)--who took less concern about the
salvation of her soul than that her height remained at sixty-eight
and her waist measurement at twenty inches.  Well, the other morning,
Lavinia had heard the postman's knock, and had just caught sight of
Invernairne returning to a mauve envelope a letter which he had
hurriedly perused.  As Lavinia swept into the room the _billet_, with
its angular feminine superscription, fell upon the tablecloth, and
she asked imperatively, "Pray, who is your solitary correspondent
this morning?"  "Why, one of those confounded scoundrels that
Labouchere is always showing up!" cried the old sinner, never batting
an eyelash, never petering an inch, though the angry missive, which
still lay on the white damask, was from the little "side-shrine of
the showroom," to say that she was so unutterably sick of her
indefinite position, that unless she received a "pony" in cash (with
which to go away for a few days and forget her identity) by lunch
time, she was going to put on her red hat and blue bird's-eye skirt,
and come straight round to interview his "squaw," tear down his
tepee, and "then set fire to the prairie."

"A dod-gasted betting circular from Brussels, my darling, an alleged
state-aided raffle for a carriage and pair," he continued.  "It is
perfectly monstrous that such stuff is allowed to pass through the
G.P.O.!"  Men are never too crafty to rule by pretending to submit,
well knowing that a suspicious woman who has lost her temper is the
prize bunk of the universe; but it was gratuitously mean of him to
kick her as she lay in a frenzy of screaming and laughing on the
hearthrug, notwithstanding the pretty general agreement amongst
medical men that when a person is hysterical certain portions of the
body have absolutely no feeling.

Evelyn has just written to ask if he may take me on Wednesday next to
the annual show of the National Sweet Pea Society, but I am far more
desirous of going to the Music Hall Sports, if only I can decide how
best to convey to him the fact that I am aware not only of their
existence but of their proximity.  And I here place it on record that
my vassalage to the music hall cause dates from my perusal of the
latest novelette of the enthralling "Peas-in-the-Pot Series"--_'Tween
the Met and the Mogul, or Who Shared her Brougham?_--for though I can
pretend neither to endorse or refute the opening chapter, in which
the soulless Waterloo Road Agent, utterly unscrupulous when in search
of fresh "talent," appears at the village picnic and doctors the
claret cup, whereby he not only ensnares all the more beautiful of
the village maidens, and precipitates an unseemly squabble between
two bishops, who doff their aprons and invite each other to "settle
it ahtside," but by the same mean subterfuge causes a rural dean to
compromise an aged lady district visitor in a shrubbery, and a
cub-curate to openly relate the story of the chimney-sweep at Epsom;
the main story is obviously inspired.  Again is the keen observation
of the author apparent to his readers in the chapter in which the
heroine, on her death-bed, her frail life ebbing slowly away, has
sent for the girl who had been in the same row in the chorus with
her, with an imploring request to see her ere her spirit wings its
way to the skies, and the friend, having nerved herself for the
trying interview, stands weeping by the melancholy bedside and asks
if there is any last service she can render.  "There is, there is,"
cries the dying girl, as a gleam lights up her poor wan features.
"In the top drawer of my dressing-table you will find about a bushel
and a half of somewhat sporty photographs which I shouldn't like my
Charlie to get hold of when I, alas! am no more!"  And then the poor
head falls back, and an unutterable calm comes over the scene, broken
only by the sobs of the _confidante_ as she searches among the
medicine bottles to see if there isn't a solitary, but comforting,
drain of gin left; it is an intensely engaging book.

With these themes taking the place of the very breath in my nostrils,
I slipped out after dinner the other night disguised in an old
race-course coat of Féo's, and a three-cornered French feather toque,
and went for the first time in my life alone to a music hall.  Had
Féo been at home she would probably, with the proverbial fickleness
of _méres_ in July, have tolled the bell on the whole proceeding; but
I fortunately picked up in the promenade of the hall quite a nice
girl, who, like myself, had given her chaperon the slip.  She was
dressed in a skin-tight scarlet cutaway, with a double row of
half-sovs, saved by herself out of her cigarette allowance from her
trustee, she said; white camel-hair felt hat with emerald osprey
plume, and skirt of dove-coloured zibeline with strappings and
applique of satin in the same soft tint.  Although she insisted on my
calling her "Hilda," I could find it in my heart only to give her my
name as "Jane," a piece of churlishness for which I readily made
atonement to my conscience by advancing "Hilda" the two sovereigns
without which, she said, her "beast of a landlady" was going to give
her in charge for pawning her sheets!

Though I discerned the wild generosity which led "Hilda" to assume
this recklessness in order to put me at my ease, I really laughed so
vulgarly at her irresistible drolleries that I shook one of my
garters loose, and in a desperate dive for the silver buckle and a
despairingly vicious tug at the pink silk, I drew the wretched thing
so tight that I temporarily suspended the circulation of the blood,
and put my limb in such a state of numb paralysis that I talked what
the Teutons call "gab fest," and ultimately fled in confusion.  Like
the Virginienne in Vitechapelle, "whose beauty and whose black blood
alike invited insult," any sort of exit was the way out for me;
though it seemed good, when I reached home, to lie awake and go over
it all again.  And I especially remembered that "Hilda" solicited me
to be sure to go to the Music Hall Sports; also that when, thinking
of dear Evelyn, I asked if I should bring a gentleman, she replied
enthusiastically, "Ray-ther! or his blooming scalp!"  Moreover, she
gave me the appended programme of the various events, adding that she
herself would have been a pretty hot pigeon for the third race, but
that her "boy" was a bit of a blossom in some matters, and didn't
wish it:--


AUTHORISED PROGRAMME OF EVENTS.  ONE PENNY.

1.0 p.m.  ONE MILE HARE AND HOUNDS RACE.--Proprietors pursued by
Disengaged Artistes.  Hares (proprietors) to receive 120 yards start,
and each Hound pulling down a Hare to receive a fortnight's
engagement at his, or her, highest West End salary.  11,473 subs.,
all Hounds.  Three Hares to enter, or no race.

1.30 p.m.  COMIC EXIT COMPETITION (to be won three years in
succession).  The Cup, a valuable piece of Royal Porcelain with two
handles, suitable for any Leading Lady's dressing-room, is at present
held by _Mr Alec Blinkers_, who, in his highly successful sketch
entitled "Penny-a-Saucer, Pick-where-you-like," catches an imaginary
white cabbage-moth, flying above a pot of musk on the back cloth,
swallows it, falls over a coffee-stall, and goes into the wings with
a head-spin.  There are five entries, as follows:

_Ben Brill_, who does the side-splitting wrassle with the dummy
policeman in "The Rozzers Club Raid";

_Harry Tee_, whose "Melodious Ironfoundry," in which he so feelingly
renders "The Blind Boy," on an engine bedplate weighing 20 cwt.,
heads the hanger at Wigan next week;

_W. Higgs_, who carries on the trunk in the first act of "The Horse
Doctor";

_Fred Hipoleon_, hind legs of the Blondin Hippopotamus; and

_The Luggage Man at Oldham_ (entered by wire).

2.0 p.m.  THROWING THE CHAIRMAN'S HAMMER.--This long-popular event
has had to be abandoned, owing to the decadence of these once
flourishing officials, the last one of which has, we regret to say,
just gone off his dip in St Giles's Workhouse from a surfeit of
gin-and-water; but a prize for lady series has been substituted,
entitled:

SLINGING THE BLUE WHEEZE.--First Prize, A Gallon of Sunburn Lotion,
donated by the Southend Chemist that sees to the Sons of the
Phœnix; Second Prize, a Nansen Ice Pick and a Sealskin Mandoline,
sent by King Oscar of Sweden; Third Prize, a Japanese Pot Fern and a
Dish of Hops, by the landlord of "The Three Thugs," Lambeth Walk.

2.30 p.m.  HOUSE-EMPTYING HANDICAP (Standing Record, 1 min. 11 secs.,
by the Three Brothers Mucus, the Men Toad's, at Bolivar's Varieties,
Battersea, June 27th, 1898):

Singing Navvies with "The Larboard Watch" .... Over ½ min.

Musical Clowns playing "Carnival de Venise" .... Over ¼ min.

Perpetrators, male or female, of dud ballad alluding to Ireland as
"the brightest gem in the Empire's crown" .... Scratch

Stinkerini's Performing Dogs and Monkeys .... Rec. 15 secs.

Male Quartette in "Man the Lifeboat"  Rec. 20 secs.

Handbell Ringers, Sword Swallowers, and Harness Turns .... Rec. 25
secs.

Comic Singers alluding to the _pulex irritans_, the mother-in-law, or
to Nausea-Marina .... Rec. 30 secs.

3.0 till 5.15 p.m.  STANDING JUMPS (Habitual Patrons of Matinee
Performances only)--First Prize, The Basket of Flowers nightly passed
up by the Musical Conductor to Miss ---- ---- (and haven't the
Property Masters of the metropolis fairly nursed it!).  The jumps are
to be acquired on the crude grain spirit invariably sold as whisky
and brandy at certain variety theatres.  Competitors taking soda or
seltzer water to carry 7 lb. extra; youthful scions of the
aristocracy who can truthfully say--betwixt you and me, man to man,
pal to pal, 'and to 'and, and 'eart to 'eart--that they have within
the past month knocked a stranger's glass over and then flatly
declined to apologise, allowed one gill.


As in this practical and prosaic time, when a peninsula in Manchuria
can be rendered perfectly untenable by a protracted rain of cast-iron
kitcheners filled with the most objectionable explosives and fired
across six miles of the Yellow Sea, it makes deuced little
difference, I think, whether you are elbowed by the makings of
to-morrow's red-hot divorce case at an athletic meeting in the
afternoon, or sit next the weekend's flash suicide at the Opera in
the evening, I fully intend going.

I am too pressed for time just now to discuss with you the matter of
a suitable background for your little French friend's prospective
photograph, but I do not endorse the close-clipt yew, the lichened
wall, the white-stoled lilies' bending stalks, idea; surely an
expectant attitude on the kerb-stone outside the County Fire Office
would be more akin to accuracy; but in the matter of Lavinia
Rowbotham's ailment, pray tell her I have seen Dr Morbus Brighteye,
and he does not consider that a floating kidney is any bar to early
matrimony, especially in the case of a debutante with fifteen hundred
a year.  Of course, from a medical point of view, it should be
stitched down, and it would quite depend on Lavinia herself whether
the stitches showed.  Even if they did, she could have them finished
off with some silk cords and tassels (which are still enjoying a
truly remarkable vogue) or a couple of chiffon bows of some bright
shade; but the point is probably quite unimportant to a bridegroom
who has long ceased wondering what bread-and-cheese is like to live
on, and whose dress clothes are so shiny that he can see to shave in
them.  It was not a heroic act of his when declaring his passion to
magnify his captaincy into a majority, although had Lavinia been
passing the St James's several hours later, as I was, when he was
being thrown out after celebrating her acceptance, she would have had
to admit that he was drunk enough for a Field Marshal, at least!  As
one of the buds of Flying Fox's year, she is probably none too
squeamish, however; I confess that I never set eyes on her without
calling to mind those frayed and worn, but still unpunctured, rubber
tyres which they show in the windows of the cycle shops on Holborn
Viaduct ticketed "Been in constant use for five years!"  She compels
one to admit at last that she has not carried a plain gold wedding
ring in her purse for sixty months for nothing!

And so adieu for to-day, kid; Mars in conjunction with the Sun
attracts me to the park.

  Yours always,
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE III

R.Y.S. _Dido_, OFF COWES, _August_ 4_th._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

How admirably, I must say, is everything in life ordained by
prescient Kismet!  Fate, for instance, clearly forsees the appalling
total of torn frills which, at the close of the season, must be
replaced by new ones, and with August gives the social rosebud just
the time she needs by putting her into flannel--and Cowes.  Then how
the sea-water bath, distributed over her fagged limbs by means of a
small organdie-muslin bag filled with bran and benzoin, which
Aphrodite so loved, that she arose from it each morning only with the
greatest possible reluctance, causes her to glow and tingle!  Under
its mellifluent influences I have already ceased to trouble my head
about Evelyn, who, with a system of love-making so amateurish that it
comes within the Colonial Secretary's definition of "unskilled
labour," wishes to know the reason for my not writing to him!

Is not that a man all over?  He regards plighting his troth in the
light of setting his foot upon my neck and holding me in bondage till
he is ready to slay his passion by indulging it.  No, no, Sammy Slow,
no modern woman with a grain of sense ever sends little notes to an
unmarried man--not until after she is married, anyway.  Moreover,
most girls are partial to most things that begin with f--flowers, and
fruit, and flirting, for three instances--and it is not because you
squeezed my waist at Ascot that I should now sit at your feet and
gaze into your eyes till I die with my head in your lap.  When a man
extorts from a woman a promise of love, he looks for a certain show
of gratitude with it.  Little less exacting than the crude Walcheren
Islander who expects his bride elect to go out into the fields to
gather sufficient wild carrots to pay the priest and to stand and
sell them in the market-place without violating the proprieties, he
digs no subway himself; even should he make a sacrifice at all, it is
only with an incipient heartache and a profound conviction of regret
to follow.

Men are creatures of insane impulses; recall, if you please, Archie
Toddington, whose wardrobe (since he never went out until the
evening) consisted entirely of dress suits and overcoats.  I am
inclined to the belief, by the way, that he was but one of a numerous
type, for I heard them talking at dinner the other evening of a
certain young gentleman, the son of a rural Bishop, who once took his
father to dine at the Orleans Club, the boy belonging only to a now
defunct institution called the Pelican besides.  Now the Prelate was
not without some misgivings concerning the Orleans as a manger for
the cloth, but whatever were his prejudices they were dissipated on
the instant of his entering the dining-room, at the sight of a
gentleman, immaculately clean and most correctly clothed, who was
dining all alone off a long-bone chop, a little toast, and--a pot of
tea!

"Dear me!" exclaimed the Bishop, as he took his seat, "I had no idea,
Octavius, that the members of this club had such simple, pastoral
tastes.  I am indeed agreeably surprised to find that one of them at
least drinks tea with his dinner."

"I ask your pardon, sir," replied Octavius, "but will you kindly
speak a little lower lest Mr Thornhill should overhear you.  Tea, I
would not impertinently remind you, is an ideal beverage for a deep
thinker, and my friend yonder is quite the ruling brain of the
_Athenæum_.  His cogitative faculties, I have no doubt, are even now
immersed in some profound distich for his next edition."

Never did a Bishop feel in better company; whereas, as a matter of
fact, Mr Thornhill, being only just out of bed, was taking his "early
evening breakfast" and inwardly debating whether he should devote
himself to Bessie Bellwood at the Pavilion or Lottie Dettmar at the
Trocadero, and which of the two houses possessed the easiest
fauteuils to go to sleep in!

But I am neglecting Archie Toddington of the chronic dress suit.

On a certain Sunday evening at nine o'clock, then, Archie, feeling
fearfully stale and solitary, and, like all misanthropists believing
himself to be the repository of the whole world's suffering, strolled
into St George's Chapel in Albemarle Street, pausing on the threshold
to cough, lest his sudden entrance should cause too great a shock.
It was an "after dinner evensong," and the little proprietary
chapel-of-ease (now alas! swept away) where evening dress was
"indispensable" in the sofa-pews, optional in the gallery, and
ladies' bonnets only allowed in the organ-loft, was very full of
smart people who had dined late.  Brave men, groomed to the last gasp
of dilettante exquisiteness, and fair women from whose billowing
bosoms diamonds flashed like beams of white light from Gris-nez, sat
and listened with polished languor to a short, thin discourse on
"Behold a woman came."  Then the organ commanded closer attention by
uttering an imperious peal, and Mrs Cora Brown-Potter, looking like
every bird in the tree, in a ravishing low-necked evening frock of
amber silk covered with black Chantilly lace, rendered slightly less
décolleté by a white lace berthe, headed by a band of chiffon, and
depending from the bared shoulders, stood forth.  The hat surmounting
her shapely head was of white transparent lace-straw; its raised
crown, supported by circles of mauve and white lilac in entrancing
combinations, the cachepeignes being black cherries and the faint
perfume of fleur-qui-meurt giving the correct signature to the only
possible chapeau in which the beautiful wearer could accurately
realise the entangled and difficult "atmosphere" of _The Holy City_.
It was simply perfection; for a burnt-brown straw, a sheaf of
Annunciation lilies, two silver thistles, a pot of musk, a splash of
amethyst miroir velvet--all of which suggestions emanated from
amiable worshippers in the front rows--would have ruined all.

And then she spoke her allotted lines--slowly and with measured bleat
at first, but louder and louder as the organist, warming to his work,
took up the running, until finally she broke into the the melody
itself, and----

Archibald Toddington sank down within his pew, deeply and seriously
(though happily not fatally) stung.  Thirty years had rolled away in
half as many minutes, and once again he was a boy at Eton, hopelessly
in love with the little daughter of the boat-builder, and fearing
nothing but a famine at Layton's.  Remorse is, after all, a
thoroughly wholesome and healthy secretion: with what bitter anguish
do we recall those awful early virtues which we now know to have been
only wasted opportunities!

His penitence was very real: from that hour forward he resolved to
reform and lead a new life.  He would begin by having a ginger ale,
neat, at the Badminton, that he might the sooner grow accustomed to
that harmless stomachic; again, should he live to be a hundred, he
would be scrupulously careful in future always to substitute
"blooming" for the ordinary embellishments to conversation.  Then
with regard to----

An unbidden sigh came from the very pit of his stomach as he dived
his right hand into an unusually deep pocket inserted in the left
breast of his waistcoat and pulled out about two hundred of their
visiting cards.  With moisture in his eyes he read the top one:

  +-----------------------------------------------------+
  |                                                     |
  |  Of course I forgive you, but as for believing      |
  |  you, that is quite another thing.  Am leaving      |
  |  Lupus Street to-night.  Going to some ripping      |
  |  rooms in Claverton Street, close to the old pitch. |
  |  Have changed name to Ida Onslowe.  If you          |
  |  come up bring some cold stuff from that shop in    |
  |  Piccadilly, as my landlady's brat has got the      |
  |  ringworm, and I am not taking any tiffin from      |
  |  downstairs.  _Do come_.  KID.                      |
  |                                                     |
  +-----------------------------------------------------+

Poor little Ida; and what a thorough little sportsman she always was!
Yet she was but one out of his last two hundred, who, as their bits
of pasteboard attested, haled from half the best-known streets and
roads of the honeymoon districts of this great metropolis.  He rose
to leave the chapel and walked towards the door with the cards still
clutched in his right hand.  As he joined the fringe of the
communicants who were politely shoving one another through the exit,
he could move forward only at the rate of six inches a shuffle; but
here again was a blessing in disguise.  For as he passed through the
porch, there stared him in the face a brass-bound box of polished
oak, having in its lid an oblong aperture, above which was inscribed
in white and gold:

  "FOR THE ADDRESSES OF THOSE WHO WISH
  TO BE VISITED BY THE CLERGY."


Without an instant's hesitation he raised his hand and dropped the
ten score cards into the slit; so real, so visible, so conspicuous
was the peril of these girls, that no movement tending to their
redemption could possibly be adjudged too momentous.  Experiencing
that peculiar glow of satisfaction which comes of earning a halo and
earning it cheaply, Archibald Toddington turned to the right into
Piccadilly, and strolled down the incline to the Badminton.

Never in your life I suppose, dear, have you tasted a drink called
"Three-cornered Sarah," which is said to have been invented by a
subaltern of the King's Dragoon Guards, stationed at Rawal Pindi, who
wished not only to forget the past, but to be oblivious of the
present and contemptuous of the future?  Anyway, Archie fell in with
a doughty representative of this famous regiment, and, after a couple
or three goes of "Sarah," felt like carrying civilisation into the
Congo, or putting down an insurrectionary hill tribe single-handed.
The spell of the amber silk frock covered with black Chantilly was
broken into pieces and the pieces lost; the enchantment of the white
lilac hat with the black cherry cachepeignes had evaporated into thin
air, and been blown into Iceland by a gale from the south.  Within
one short hour, indeed, Archie, who had undertaken not only to give
the Dragoon a merry evening, but to ring in miracles on him in the
peacherino line, so poignantly repented the loss of all his
addresses, that he was found hammering on the door of the chapel and
objurgating the housekeepers of the surrounding premises because none
of them knew where lived the old verger-johnnie, or whatever they
call him, who kept the keys of the place!  Thus the cards were for
ever lost to him; though doubtless the spiritual needs of the
addressees received attention, for that the old-fashioned, one-idea'd
bigot is not believed to exist in the Church in the present day was
amply proved on the night when the Bishop of Barchester was followed
from St James's Hall to the very doorstep of the house opposite the
Green Park, where he was staying for the May meetings, by a foreign
lady who thought that she recognised him.  As she dumbly but
persistently refused to accept his assurances that he had never met
her in society--and he would now probably deny the incident in toto,
but that I have, curiously enough, preserved the cutting from the
church paper to which he wrote for editorial advice as to how a
gentleman should get rid of a female who was too persistent in the
street, and the editor suggested going into a Turkish bath and
suddenly disrobing--he had finally to make a swift bolt indoors and
slam the door violently in her face.  So loud and despotic, however,
was the subsequent knocking, that the Bishop himself returned to find
not only the lady, but a police constable, on the doorstep, and about
three thousand idle persons gathered around them.  "I 'umbly beg yer
lordship's pardon for knockin'," said the policeman, respectful to
the verge of servility, "but when you was a-lettin' this young lady
out just now, you shut her skirt in the door!"

I have often thought that if only our police-constables, who affect
to be _Curii_, but in private live like Bacchanals, were drawn from a
more æsthetic class than is the case, they would, by exercising a
greater sense of delicacy, cause less suffering to the susceptible.
Let me illustrate my contention by admitting that I have for years
been endeavouring in vain to find out what it is that the loquacious
hawker at the street corner has in the pillbox.  I have listened to
his breezy bleat so often that I know his yarn by heart (and
sometimes "give" it in congenial company), but never yet have I heard
its conclusion, nor have I beheld the little animal.  On every
occasion, just as the Autolycan has been going to raise the lid of
the box, odious P.C. 797 has arrived from the clouds and
blue-pencilled the show.  Only yesterday, at the corner of a
_cul-de-sac_ in Regent Street, I came upon the patient person of
bilious temperament and doubtless sedentary habits, who experiences
so many commercial cancellations at the hands of the police.  As
usual, he had an admiring, if not a monied audience; and he cried:

"Laidies an' gentlemen,--May I claim yer kind an' perlite attention
for the purpus' of introjuicin' to yer notice a livin' novelty from
the new world beneath the Southern Cross, where every prospec'
pleases, an' female modesty is so pronounced that the clean things
from the laundry is never aired afore the kitchen fire for fear of
upsettin' the mental balance o' the butcher's boy when he brings
round the j'int for dinner, an' looks in at the airy winder?  Thanks.
I 'ave 'ere--I say I 'ave 'ere, contained in this small box, the only
insec' overlooked by Adam when he took his seat on the rainbow to
christen the marv'llous creations o' the animal world.  It is well
known to, an' 'ighly respected by, the black aboriginals o'
Burragorang, from its intelligent 'abit of manufacturin' its own
lan'marks as it traverses the jungle, by spittin' on the grass an'
stoppin' it from growin', thus renderin' return easy an'
loss-o'-bearin's out o' the question.  Though many attempts 'ave been
made to subdue, an' so tame, the little creature, the feat has been
accomplished only thrice within 'istory; once by Timandra Ventidius,
the Macedonian Amazon as led her countrymen in the insurrection
against Turkey, armed with nothin' but an ordinary 'at-pin (tho'
carryin' a quartern o' chloroform in her jeans, in case she should
fall into the 'ands o' the Turks); secondly, by the celebrated
Austrian savant, Yagerwohl, patentee o' the world-famed sensitised
toilet-ware for hospitals, which, ev'ry time a patient washes his
'ands causes a bell to ring in the matron's room; and, thirdly, by
myself, who 'ad it from a well-known 'Arley Street medical man, what
went off his dot after runnin'-up in a local billiard 'andicap, an'
who is at present immured in a private 'ome for the potty, practisin'
nursery-cannons on the kitchen dresser with a tomato, a Spanish
onion, an' a 'ard-boiled egg.  But mere assertion is 'ardly the same
thing as proof; what each one of you a-standin' round me requires is
ocular demonstration.  With yer kind permission I shall therefore
proceed at once to----"

"Pass away, now, pass away!" cried P.C.s 797 and 798 in chorus, and
the persecuted wizard of the pillbox, bearing his adversity with as
philosophical a fortitude as he could summon, sighed heavily and
sneaked off.  But anon, anon.

By all who do not permit the state of the markets to interfere with
social duty, Cowes Regatta is unanimously recognised as the only
possible sequel to Goodwood; but the distinguished tenants of many of
the tiny villas and cottages, half buried in the trees that cluster
on the heights above the town, were witnesses of the diverting sequel
to a much earlier festivity yesterday morning.  But perhaps it would
be better for me to present you with the events constituting the
latest edition of The Earl and the Girl--to say nothing of the
Countess--in their chronological order.  Let us sit upon the ground,
as Richard II. says.

You have heard of Lord Catterick, haven't you?  A none too affluent
but sound old sexagenarian sportsman, dear Kid, with a heart as big
as a hyacinth farm in Zeeland, but matrimonially shackled to an
ogress of fifty, too ill-tempered, domineering, and utterly
unreasonable to exist save in a Trollopian novel.  Colour is lent to
the supposition that he married her to win an after-dinner bet by his
seemingly incurable mania for making love to every mortal thing in
petticoats that crosses his path; though that may be no more than
carelessness, since Virtue itself is only a continual struggle
against the promptings of Nature, as I daresay you have found it.
Moreover, he had been much impressed, ten or twelve years ago, by a
certain passage in an erotic novel which said that the only thing to
properly wake up a man suffering from acute melancholia, was a rapid
love-affair with a flamingly red-haired woman, to damage whose
reputation it would be necessary to hug her in broad daylight in
front of the Mansion House--a none too accurate reference to Miss
Jessica Dux, who is a pronounced blonde.  Though only a cloak model,
Miss Dux came, I understand, of a good, but impoverished family who
for years accepted money reluctantly from relations, and, when these
dried up, went fut.  Then the seven noble girls drew lots to
determine which one of them should sacrifice herself to save pater
from going out to work, and--Jessica pulled out the black bean.

But for the incessant tight-lacing in the showrooms, the wearying
attentions of the manager, and the grotesque air of immeasurable
superiority assumed by the customers before whom she had to strut, to
turn, to pose at command, clad in creations of golden spider's-web,
Jessica would cheerfully have dropped everything else to have stayed
on at Madame Junon's, for though she didn't turn a very deep furrow
in the pay roll, the work was very gratifying and her hips were much
admired.  Then, all on a morning early, Lord Catterick in new-milk
innocence dropped in to see a frock "tried on" his liege-madam.  His
eyes encountered Jessica's; he pencilled a few warm words on a (must
have been asbestos) visiting card, and that night Miss Dux made her
first acquaintance with the half-guinea dinner at the Berkeley.

It was about four months later, or a week ago, that Lady Catterick
opened a letter addressed to her husband which had come by the
evening post.  Seldom or never before had she descended to this
particular meanness, but the indented die on the back of the
envelope--"Impératrice et Cie, Clifford Street, W."--proved an
irresistible lure, and she broke the seal before she fully realised
what she was doing.  And it was a half-dead woman she was, dear Pat,
as her little grey eyes ran down the many items in a bill full
fourteen inches long, with a total of £368, 18s. 4d., and a final tag
to the effect that Impératrice et Cie would be glad to receive a
cheque from his lordship at his early convenience!

Smothered gasps and little muffled screams escaped her as she read
such lines as "Chestnut Sunday, May 17th: Tagg's Island toilette of
biscuit Donegal linen trimmed broderie Anglaise with Valenciennes
insertions, £31, 10s.," and "May 22nd: Lemon-tinted chiffon Opera
gown with corsage of pink fuchsias a la Philemon et Baucis, £47, 5s."
Then came on "June 3rd: Ascot toilette of rose-silk voile over white
louisine with Alençon flounces, £52, 10s.," and on the 6th:
"Southend-on-Sea boudoir gown in crépe-de-chine, lined Japanese silk,
£15, 15s.," followed by "Third-class railway fare of special-delivery
porter (Saturday evening), 4s. 4d."  Other entries, scarcely less
disturbing, included a "Creation in white mousseline velours
encrusted with black pailletté (Lingfield Park), £63, 0s.," a "Golden
straw plait chapeau with white feathers en suite, £7, 7s. 0d.," and,
somewhat lower down, an "Evening frock of ultramarine chiffon
embroidered silver sequins (Ponymoore's Ball), with bunches of shaded
pink fruit on the décolletage, £21, 0s. 0d.," the lot amounting, as I
said before, to the quite respectable sum of £368, 18s. 4d.!  And all
this, my dear, to a woman whose very feminine idea of limiting male
extravagance consisted in continually demonstrating how frocks could
be bought for less money than suits of clothes!

Between 7 P.M. and half-past midnight, Lady Catterick fairly fed on
that bill, like the "elderly naval man," who "ate that cook in a
week, or less," and the poison had time to soak in.  So that when,
somewhere in the neighbourhood of 12.50 A.M., Catterick's uncertain
footsteps sounded on the stairs, the Countess arose half-mast high in
her bed and cleared her throat to get rid of some honest prose--for,
though an unfaithful husband may dabble heavily in poetry, his
deceived wife will in nine cases out of ten rely (while speech lasts,
at any rate) wholly upon such plain sentences as drop from the tongue
without apparent effort.  Addressing him as "you Tarquin of Tagg's
Island!" and "you gin-and-cockling Lothario!" by turns--the latter
being an undoubted allusion to the Southend item--her ladyship
crowded enough novel and up-to-date abuse into the next twenty
minutes to have warranted the assumption that her life had been spent
among soles and flounders rather than Courts and coronets; yet
Catterick yawned through it all in absolute indifference.  In
reality, his oblivion was due to alcohol and, with the
highly-rectified cunning which accords with alcoholisation and
protects its votaries, he made no attempt to cut into trouble of any
sort, though here and there in the indictment he caught a fugitive
word which seemed to call for thought.  When the Countess's
vituperation had run its course, therefore, he stumbled across the
chamber--or lurched across the room, if you prefer it--and, laying
the hand of remonstrance on his wife's frilled shoulder, observed:

"Goo' ni', Rox'lana, goo' ni'.  I'll say wha've got t' say in
morn'ng: much too tire' t' ni'.  But this mush I _will_ r'mark:
you're a swee' woman, you're a p'ffic lady, also a d'vout lover of
Art, 'n'earnest stood'nt of Lit'rachoor, an' a class'cal 'thority on
Hist'ry, but as a wom'n of th' world--I say as a wom'n of th' world,
Rox'lana--you're a varnish!  Goo' ni'!"

The rapidity with which the sound of his snoring succeeded his exit,
caused the worried woman even more uneasiness than the first sight of
the modiste's bill had done.  Surely no guilty man could fall asleep
so readily?  Racked by the anguished reflection that people who are
supposed to marry largely for the sake of being happy may be
presumed, if they subsequently remain silent, to have gained what
they desired, Lady Catterick passed a sleepless night, and turned up
at the breakfast table next morning looking positively hideous.

The Earl was, on the contrary, quite breezily cheerful.  Adopting a
tone of amused pity--a no-matter-what-you-do-it-runs-in-your-family
air--he even demanded the offending milliner's bill, adding:

"I hate to seem to reproach you in any way, Roxalana, but upon my
honour you were the human limit last night!  And your phrases!--odds,
blud o' the murdered missionaries in Zanzibar, your phrases!  Where
do you cull it all?  From which of the Sunday penn'orths do you draw
inspiration?  Nevertheless, despite your eccentricities, I will
remain your friend.  Give me the obnoxious invoice--good--ere the
lamps are lighted it shall be manifest to at least one practical
joker that his sense of humour has got beyond proper control.
_Adios_; I shall not be in to lunch."

As a "rare old plant" this successful bit of bluff was about a stone
and a neck in front of "the ivy green," yet, once outdoors, Lord
Catterick's demeanour became serious rather than jubilant.  An
appearance in the Divorce Court he feared less on account of any
social paralysis which might supervene than of absolute financial
death.  No matter at what cost, therefore, Impératrice's bill would
have to be met that day.

To look towards Israel for assistance was useless.  Lord Catterick
had a record in Jewry that the Shylocks themselves kept sweet only as
an antidote to gluttony.  He turned, therefore, to an old Harrow chum
who was now an electioneering agent, with an invalid wife in the
Engadine, an easy-going roysterer who was nearly always at the Club
in order to get his affectionate wife's letters, and so avoid the
fearful scene that would happen if one of those epistles fell into
the hands of his typewriter.  This good soul grew a trifle
beetle-browed at first, but eventually filled out a pink slip for
£370, on the strict understanding that it didn't extend over
Saturday, and Catterick started for the bank with as much front as a
fortification.

Probably the world seems not so bad after all to the man who, having
devoted the best part of the day to solicitation and whisky sours,
has at last achieved his object, but the thing that did seem hard to
Catterick was having to part with that £368 odd without keeping back
a little bit of pewter for himself.  Much ruminating seemed only to
increase the hardship until, arriving at the milliners, he conceived
and bare the brilliant scheme of paying £250 off the bill and
reserving £120 for a brief congress of illicit joy away from
town--why not a quiet and unpretentious run over to the Island?  So
entirely admirable did the idea seem that, having dropped the ten
ponies to Impératrice's, he found it hard to hold himself down while
a hansom carried him to Miss Dux's preposterously bijou flat.  That
self-same evening Miss Dux commenced her packing, and on the
following day the pair set out for Cowes.

It was by the first post on the day following that of the Earl and
the girl's departure, that a second envelope, bearing the indented
die of the odious couturieres in Clifford Street, turned up at the
Catterick mansion, and all but decided the Countess to track down her
husband and shoot him.  The "all but" took the shape of her family
solicitor who, being personally desirous of showing up in the
vicinity of Castle Garden, persuaded his client that it would be
better to tickle the law into turning one foot-loose than to pay the
extreme penalty for a man with a heart two sizes smaller than a golf
ball.  For, no longer to keep you in suspense, dear, the second
communication from Imperatrice's was far too significant to admit of
doubt, and ran:

  _To bill delivered_ . . . . . . . . . . . £368 18 4
  _By Cash on account next day_ . . . . . .  250  0 0
                                           ----------
  _Balance_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . £118 18 4

P.S.--_The favour of your Lordship's cheque is politely but
imperatively requested, since the person to whom the goods were
supplied, by your Lordship's order and selection, has lately
disappeared from her flat in Ridgmount Gardens, leaving nothing
behind but an unsettled milk bill._  I. ET CIE.


I can safely leave to your vivid imagination the "scene," enacted
within the range of the windows of Nubia House, which terminated this
little comedy yesterday, for, notwithstanding Lady Catterick's
pronounced hostility towards the Island and all its inhabitants since
the day when a rustic clod of a railway porter stuck his head into
the carriage in which she was travelling from Ventnor with her three
somewhat shelf-worn sisters and addressing the quartette, all as
sombre as convent postulants and erect as Easter candles, asked
gruffly, "All Cowes in 'ere?" she turned up full of vigour,
accompanied by her solicitor and a couple of hunting crops!

The sailor-man who periodically goes ashore in the dinghy for
letters, has just brought me a wire from dear Phyllis Waring--don't
you remember how we all used to sing in muffled tones in the old
dormitories at the _pensionnat_:

  Me name's Betsy Waring,
  Wot goes aht a-chairing?

--to say she cannot come yotting for a day or two, as she has lost
the latchkey of her flat, and is quite unable to lock up until she
gets another.  With customary good nature, she lent it late the other
evening to be dropped down the back of a young lady whose nose was
bleeding outside the Continental, and it has not since been seen.  It
certainly was not in the young lady's garments when she was undressed
at Vine Street police-station a little later on; everybody present
can swear to that.  She is coming over, however, on Thursday;
meanwhile my curiosity to learn all about her fall-out with Eustace
Doorstep (or whatever was his surname) comes near consuming me.  As I
think I once told you, Eustace lately heard from some busybody all
about Phyllis's earlier _affaire_ with Geoffrey, and he raged and
stormed for a time like that spoiled and undersmacked brat who did
not reach the bazaar with his nurse until the gates were closed, and
consequently "didn't get a drum."  Eustace is one of those simple,
countrified men who want to marry a girl who has loved no one else,
but whom any amount of others have idolised from a respectful
distance.  What logic, or--want of it!  Would the honeysuckle attract
the bee if it yielded no pollen?

Yours, for the next twenty minutes on a deck-chair _couchant_, lazily
absorbing Nature's sermon that lives in the blue vault above,

  Vi.




EPISTLE IV

HOTEL VASISTAS, DINARD, _Septembre_ 4_re._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

I am pencilling these lines to you while eating strawberry ices under
a warm sun in a perfectly idyllic garden full of royal roses, and
within two rods and a bittock of a turquoise sea from which, just
across a toy estuary, rise the imperishable crested beauties of St
Malo.  Here are aromatic breezes, American bars, health, vigour,
culture, Parisian revue stars sea-bathing in picture hats and
passionate silk stockings, the loveliest crevettes imaginable,
well-aired beds, comely female servants strictly engaged without
characters, petits-chevaux and the musical glasses; and still I am
not happy.  Since your two most prominent characteristics, next to
your cheekbones, are curiosity and love of listening, I will tell you
why.  If there be any bottom to the theological dogma of that
profound, albeit prolix, metaphysician, Bhikku Ananda Maitriya, of
Rangoon, there was a new star born in the Middle Way on Monday night,
for during the small dog watches, Evelyn Godolphin Mountprospect,
fourth and youngest son of the Earl of Atholbrose, passed in his
dinner pail.

He met his end in the shape of the new regimental mess waistcoat, or
rather in his suicidal efforts to get into it: he died of tight
lacing.  Poor little Evelyn!  In fancy I can see the flush of anger
on his cheeks, the contemptuous coiling of his spiral nostrils as he
struggled vainly with the conquering corset, breaking a whalebone
here or rending the broché-batiste there, but never quite succeeding
in completing the frightful misplacement of the internal clockwork of
the body which only the anatomist can fully describe, and the War
Office is absolutely oblivious to.  Sad indeed it is to see the very
flower of military chivalry stagger and fall, not on the battlefield
but the parade ground, there to lie prone with its staylaces cut, the
while the Army Medical Corps burns a feather.

That I ever really felt up to breaking home ties for the boy's own
sweet sake is extremely problematical.  Society is an over-girled
community and the debutante whose female parent cares nothing for
decking her out and putting her where she will be well seen is apt to
have her head turned by coach-panels as richly emblazoned as are the
Atholbrose's; they are cream and gold, you may remember, with the
figure of a roysterer, rampant, in a restaurant, bar sinister, above
the family motto "One more won't hurt us!"  But Evelyn himself was
something of a featherweight; the clinging vine rather than the
sturdy oak, and the direct antithesis to what a society schoolgirl
designates a hummer.  Though art-gallery and shop-broke, he was more
fitted to become the dog Tray of a young married woman than the
money-getter to a fashionable bride of his own; and his three
brothers had been much the same.

For instance, Caedmon, the eldest, who in a previous state of
existence had probably been a lowing white Chillingham bull-calf, had
been reared side by side with a pretty chocolate-red Hereford cow
with whom (to cut the bovine metaphor) he had made love from his
perambulator in Kensington Gardens.  Her name was Lorna Porter, and
her family tree was every bit as genteel and starchy as the acacia
itself.  From Eton Caedmon had sent her pretty little weekly notes
enclosing buttercups and daisies privately picked from _les plancher
des vaches_--(Pray overlook it for once, dear.  Phyllis Waring, just
off to gather champignons, is chattering at my elbow, and the French
language is _so_ infectious!)--and from Oxford he consigned further
fickle screeds and fritillaries--need I explain that I allude to the
wild flowers which abound at Abingdon and not to any kind of lingerie?

Miss Porter's people, however, entertained other matrimonial views
concerning her, and eventually betrothed her to a South African
person who proposed to settle something like forty-thousand a year on
her for fencing foils and skipping ropes--indispensable articles in
the daily pursuit of flexibility and youthfulness--alone.  She being
a Warwickshire beauty, her sacrificial outfit was built in Birmingham
and her passage was booked to the Cape, whither she was shortly to
proceed in the keeping of all manner of stern relations.  To Caedmon,
who suddenly made the belated discovery that years of propinquity had
meant something more than mere lukewarm amusement, it was an
overwhelming blow, nor could he discern the slightest prospect of
ever again squeezing her velvety paws or treading delicately beneath
the table on the only footwear in London which would have had
Cinderella beaten to pulp.  The thought was maddening; yet in Lorna's
impending departure Caedmon could see nothing but his own finish--a
year of reckless drinking, a month's disinheritance, a family
reconciliation, and a hateful future with a homespun consort.

Gold--red gold which will achieve almost anything in existence save
immunity from gout to the devotee of sparkling ales--was at length
accountable for Miss Porter finding on her window-sill one morning,
an impassioned petition from Caedmon, in which he attempted to pour
forth the left lobe of his soul, but only ran to about one
composing-stick of third-class seaside-novelette dead-weight.
Nevertheless his burning plea to be granted one brief evening of her
society ere she passed out of his blighted life for ever, was
expressed with sufficient clarity to appeal to any woman's inherited
and cultivated love of playing with fire, and Lorna Porter inwardly
and instantly resolved upon making the concession.  No matter on how
transparent a subterfuge, her last night in England should be given
to Caedmon; her own hungering heart no less than her love for burning
incense dictated it.  She sent an unsigned wire to warn Caedmon that
he might get his wish at any moment; after which she stood in front
of her mirror and changed her jewellery six times while wondering
what on earth could have first given her the idea that he was a sort
of modern St Anthony at about five-stone-seven!

Now, waiting many days for a telegram in a West-end club which has
been given over to the pail-and-brush mechanic for autumn renovation
is not an ideal pastime for an epicure and a man of fashion.  To be
compelled to sit and yawn in an atmosphere of size and varnish, in
halls temporarily tenanted by voluble and irascible artisans to whom
one's very presence in the month of holidays and deserted streets is
sufficient evidence of one's constitutional bent for shifting the cut
on the working classes, is singularly tortuous.  Blobs of whitening
are apt to fall in perilous proximity to one's coat; jets of slopwash
descend suddenly in hazardous contiguousness to one's hat, until one
grows in time to jump aside for one's very life out of the line of a
swinging platform, or the range of a falling trestle, at the faintest
echo of "Stan' by the sidebar rope, Josh!" or "Lower your endabit,
Bill!"; yet for more than half a week Lord Caedmon bravely faced it
all.

Then at last there came a wire.  It was coded from the fair town
whose name is so unpleasantly suggestive of cannibalistic intolerance
of chastity--"Nuneaten, 5.24 P.M."--and it ran:


"_Little parcel will arrive Euston to-night,_ 8.30, _legibly
inscribed Fragile._"


It bore no signature, not another word; that was all.  Yet Caedmon,
as he read it forty times, felt the sunshine penetrate his soul anew.
There arose before his eyes a vista of a refined and beautiful girl
in white Mechlin lace and orange-blossoms, turning from a chancel
filled with tulips and palms and begonias and white hyacinths, on all
of which the soft rose light filtered in through a great stained
east-window, to--to cast all aside for a vulgar assignation at a
railway station!  "Fragile" was not the word for it: it was frail
beyond the limit of human comprehension.

With Lorna's self-reproachful adjective inscribed upon his brain,
Caedmon jumped into a cab and drove to the most intensely respectable
hotel in Berkeley Square, an establishment so finnickingly exclusive
that its maitre would hardly look at gold and lands unless tendered
by one who had previously submitted references; and ordered dinner.
Surely, he reasoned, if Lorna, for the old love's sake, were willing
to incur this peril, she should be dragged to no ostentatious Palm
Room, nor exposed to the leers of _hoi polloi_ in the best-accredited
"smart" restaurant.  "Fragile!"  Sweet vestal!  Though she clearly
realised the ineffable jeopardy in which the promptings of her heart
involved her, her innate sense of culture made her shrink from the
use of the meaner, but more appropriate vulgarism, "risky!"

Long before his time, and with the stealthy step of an ogre on his
way to rob a cradle, Lord Caedmon alighted from a muffled brougham,
passed beneath the frowning arch of Euston Station, and awaited the
coming of the restaurant train from Warwickshire.  And no sooner had
it slidden silently in, than the door of a reserved-first opened, and
Lorna Porter, apparently in evening dress, but completely enveloped
in a travelling cloak and hood of soap-sud grey, stepped out.
Caedmon positively pounced upon her.

"How fearfy good of Twee-est to come!" he cried, taking both her
hands in his.

"Oh, not so vewy fearfy, my twee," answered Lorna, for she too was an
adept in the pidgin; adding with a wicked wistfulness in her great
brown eyes, "though Twee-est would get awfy, _awfy_ ratin' if pals
found out, and Twee-est is scary of ratin'!"

"Twee-est let ratin' go hang; Twee give Twee-est deevie ickle dinnie,
and Twee-est buck-up!" said Caedmon, consolingly; by which time they
were mercifully at the brougham.  But the same conversational fog
enveloped his intellect throughout a long and elaborate dinner, and
it was not until Lorna, who was quite a red-corpuscled person when
she wished to be, had waited for it to lift until the coffee and
liqueurs came, that she wondered whether it might be that he was
squiffy.  Not that such was the case at all, dear.  In reality, he
had brooded over her password "Fragile" until he had brought on a
series of neurotic attacks which the French would call collectively
_le petit mal_.  At Market Harboro, two years ago, I had a hunter, a
rare fleabitten grey, similarly affected.  The unfortunate beast
remembered having one day staked himself on a thickset hedge, so that
ever afterwards when he came to one, he dropped his ears, screwed his
head slightly to the right, and, with wide-open eyes and tail erect,
squatted.  Caedmon's bleat was mild and vapid, but nevertheless
regular so long as he prattled of the extraordinary vogue that
_pendie_ (appendicitis) was having; of the new restaurant being
awfully _deevie_ (delightful) but deucedly _expie_; of Lord Jimmie
being fearfully _diskie_ at finding his wife giving him some
anti-drink stuff in his coffee at _brekker_, simply because he
occasionally got so frightfully _moppie_; but whenever through
Lorna's omission to utter a weary, or an acid, "Really?" there came a
pause, he caught sight of the one word "FRAGILE!" emblazoned on the
wall, and, like my old grey, he died away behind the saddle, and
tried to swallow his palate.

Dinner over, Lord Caedmon led Lorna to the Billiard Room where nobody
ever went.  The place was, as usual, empty and shadowy, whereupon
Caedmon instantly--rang loudly for the marker.  Neither this servant
or Caedmon observed any peculiarity in the demeanour of Miss Porter
as she opened the game in effective style by stringing together 17,
nor did she pass any remark when she broke down at her next stroke
through using the jigger at a very simple, single-cushion cannon.  As
Caedmon went to the table, however, Lorna left the room, presumably
to chalk her cue or something, and--well, that was the last that was
seen of her!

His lordship, suspecting nothing, waited five minutes after taking an
ineffective shot, and then lit a cigarette.  After ten minutes he
grew uneasy; after twelve, a second footman came in and mentioned the
fact that "her ladyship" had been gone some little time, in a hansom!
As the man ceased speaking and walked away, the dreaded word appeared
in letters of fire upon the wall, and the future lord of Atholbrose
gasped for breath and clenched his fists.

"I beg y'r lordship's pardon, but is y'r lordship feelin' faint; the
room _is_ somewhat 'ot?" asked the marker.

"Naw, naw," groaned Caedmon in tones strangely Irvingian, "b-b-but
tell me, man, what is your personal conception of the meaning of
'fragile'?"

The man went as pink as a lobster cutlet at Hampton Court, but
parleyed, politely:

"Y'r lordship's pleased to be facetious, but probably y'r lordship's
'eard 'ow I've got the sack over it?"

"Over what, pray?"

"The new spirit-glasses, y'r lordship.  I've been shockin' unlucky
with 'em I'll admit, y'r lordship, but oh! they _are_ fraygile an' no
kid!  That word was stencilled on the case as they arrived in, an'
William, the carver, he says to me at the time, y'r lordship,
'Henry,' he says, 'every time as you handles these glasses,' he says,
'bear that word in mind--Fraygile.  It's French,' he says, 'an' it
means, "Bound to be Broke, Anyway,"' he says, an' it's my humble
opinion, y'r lordship----"

"Enough!  My hat and stick, at once!" shouted Caedmon, and strode out
of the place.  "Of course, of course, fool that I am, I see it all
now!" he wailed as he strode up Mount Street; "she referred to her
promise to that damned South African!"

Plunging his fists into his breeches pockets and pulling out two
brimming handsful of gold and silver, he thrust them upon an Italian
murderer who, though curfew had long sounded, stood churning from an
automatic piano the symphony to--

  "Will you--be true--to aeies--of blue
  When they look into aeies of ba-rown?"

and plunged into the velvet darkness of Grosvenor Square.

Only yesterday I received a lengthy epistle from Mrs Mortimer
Toddpush, who left town about a week ago in order to witness the
Passion Play at Horitz, but sidetracked at Zermatt after hearing in
Paris how Eve, a hussy who also made shell boxes at Bohmerwald, had
secretly married Adam, who also stoked a steamer on the Po, while on
tour in the provinces some seven months back, and would now be quite
unable to appear for a few weeks.  Eve's friend, too, a big
shield-tailed python, had been in a state of torpor for an usually
prolonged period after swallowing a tourist from the Highlands, so
that the whole show was, if the accurate expression is admissible,
clear out of plumb.  Beyond the fact that a Reverend Mr Somebody, who
was staying at the famous Smearkase Hotel half way up the Matterhorn,
had stepped through a back door in the dark and fallen a mile, more
or less, down the glacier (though the more pious of the guides
assured the rest of the party that the old gentleman would have
earned his harp three times over before striking the bottom) there
seemed to be nothing doing at Zermatt, more particularly since the
chubby bridegroom and touch-me-not bride in whom local interest
mainly centred, were not speaking to one another when the post left,
having quarrelled as to which loved the other the more, and each
being afraid to give in for fear of offending the other.

But this sort of fever usually subsides, I am told, within a month,
man's inborn nature being to philander, often to the dire distress of
the trusting young wife who fondly imagines that a husband to be
constant should be frequent.  I remember hearing (no matter how) when
last I was in Brighton--that very stamping ground for honeymooners
and others who carry their happiness about with them--of a certain
old gentleman who was ventilating, in the smoking-room of one of the
hotels, his views upon a current _cause célèbre_.  Incidentally he
averred that it was all very well for a man to go into the
witness-box and swear that he had never under any circumstances been
untrue to the partnership entered into at the altar rails; it was
better still if he could induce the jury to believe him; yet no
married man could absolutely prove that he never had sinned--on that
point he would freely wager a thirty-shilling hat!

Then there arose from a corner seat a young gentleman who had Percy
literally stamped upon him, and who had been unable to keep his
cigarette alight for yawning, and he claimed that hat.

"And I invite you to substantiate your claim, sir," rejoined the
pleasant old gentleman.

"Oh, it's an absolute walk-over!" cried Percy, with another yawn, "my
wife and I were married only yesterday afternoon, and--er, well,
we've only just come down to breakfast!"

Highly interesting as this explanation may seem, it was, after all,
mere baby food compared to the diverting details which each of the
other twenty-seven gentlemen had to invent at a moment's notice when
asked by his wife why he had not instantly and peremptorily laid
claim to the thirty-shilling hat.

Speaking of winning wildly sporting wagers, I suppose that all will
admit that Society contains no more beautiful or accomplished woman
than Lady Ellaline Dives, yet I hate her with a great personal
hatred, if only for the mean way in which she welshed--that is the
hard but accurate appellation--me out of a fiver at the Cossie's Club
only a week before I left England.  You know the Cossie's, of course?
It was of the parent club of them all that Io Mayleigh (who has
emptied her Philistine life of everything but dogs) wrote:

  "Observe the erstwhile Tub Hotel;
  Note the 'B.T.,' or tea-room smell;
  Ensconced behind its muslin blinds,
  Now matrons with contented minds,
  Discuss, with much patrician fun,
  The tea--the cake--the buttered bun."

Well, in the course of an impersonal discussion at the Cossie's on
the mistakes of anatomy, I, who have fed up on the subject, offered
to bet anyone in the room a fiver that she had a vermiform appendix,
and Ellaline Dives took me on.  And as soon as the money was posted
and covered, we adjourned to the Gazing Room, where she showed us the
scar where she had had it removed!

Mightily close to sharping, don't you think?  I felt much inclined to
have her up before the committee; yet, poor thing, she needs the
fiver more than I do, for, owing to the fabulous prices paid by our
Army in South Africa for petits fours and plovers' eggs, her income
will be sorely depleted for the next century or so.  I know quite
well, dear, that her sweet but small house in South Audley
Street--squeezed in between the wine merchant's and the
coachbuilder's it looks just about a convenient size for a convivial
tomtit--holds so many "auctioneers," as she calls them, that she and
Sir Edward habitually sit on the stairs, owing to the
men-in-possession occupying all that remains of the crested saddlebag
suite.  Even their faithful butler resigned with a curse after
jabbing a hole about as big as Pimlico in his left hand, whilst
endeavouring to open a sevenpenny tin of sheep's tongue, though Lady
Ellaline adroitly arranged with the hospital authorities to inform
the Press that it was _gastrodynia_, induced by a surfeit of foie
gras.  To repair all these ravages, Lady Ellaline lately accepted a
roving commission from Messrs Outsize and Squeale, the distinguished
hosiers; for if, as she truly says, Lady Barnhowrie can accept an
appointment to sell cod liver oil, and the Countess of Barcalwhey can
turn her impoverished self into a limited company--oho!  Bankers: the
Hole Under the Hearthstone!--to supply all who will buy with fresh
eggs and butter (which she delivers daily in her own motors), then
"why not your little Ellaline?"  Nowanights therefore at the small
dance, the man who gets a polka with her must breathe a couple of
dozen of silk socks or blue gridiron singlets into her shell-like
ear; she will not grant even a galop under twelve fine flannel shirts
with tucked or pleated fronts and necks, finished with French muslin
collars for six guineas, which (next to her reliable bullet-proof
travelling nighties for co-respondents) is her "star" line.  It must
be anything but the pleasantest of work, however, for I am told that
the Duchess of Whitehall handed her a fearful dab in the eye on the
Stand on the Champagne Stakes day at Doncaster, simply because she
had asked, incautiously but purely in a business way, "Aren't those
pink silk pants of the dear Duke's getting woefully shabby?"

Excepting only the two or three English theatrical hussies who
purposely return from the water to the wrong bathing tents--Number 12
instead of Number 21, and so on--with the deliberate intention of
being suddenly discovered by some brilliantined and bearded fool of a
Frenchman, whom they then send to fetch from their rightful disrobing
places, garments which are supposed to have no public career before
them, we do not bathe at Dinard: rather do we diligently "sand."  To
actually enter the dishevelling surf is to display an excess of zeal
only equalled by the cock who crowed himself overboard from the
bowsprit of Lord Dufferin's yacht in his frantic attempts to salute
the rising sun in Scandinavia; but I think if only you could have
seen me walking the plank promenade on the _plage_ this morning in a
skin-tight silk suit of bereavement violet, with silk stockings to
match and chrome strapped shoes with paste buckles, you would have
admitted, in disagreement with the _passé_ soprano who budded too
late, that there are other ways of securing public attention besides
giving lessons on the posthorn from the top of Nelson's monument.
For a girl to simulate a pretence of using the hot sea-water footbath
which is brought to her from the beach-cauldron on returning to her
_cabinet de bain_ is surely less fuzzy than the male Berkshire
pretence of kissing all the pretty women and extorting silver from
the men under the name of "Hocktide tutty" (and you can safely bet a
level pony if the custom had been to get the money out of the women
and kiss the men, it would have been entombed with Alumid, whose last
favourable Press notice appeared in the Domesday Book!); and neither
puritanical flam nor structural imperfections need stand in the way
of her extending the joyous mitt to her pals to join her in a
cigarette in her machine, since the floor and the seats are never,
like those of the archaic Margate article, so soaking wet that you
cannot sit down without ruining your _création_.  Unfortunately the
French jump too precipitately at conclusions, and, though it takes a
pretty good deal at any time to create surprise at a Gallic
watering-place, a distinctly false and an altogether too
comprehensive impression of pudic British maidenhood has been
indelibly stamped on the minds of the irrepressible _gommeux_ here
through one of their number having politely inquired of one of the
copper-haired drabs on the steps of her obscure hotel the other
morning if there was anything that he could do for her, and received
the reply:

"Oh, it's very sweet of you, old dear, but if you'd give us a kiss,
stand us a bottle, tell us an easy blue story, and take us into the
Casino to show us how to play those 'little horses,' I should take it
pal-ish, for what with your croupiers speakin' so quick and usin'
their rakes so handy, all as I seem to do is to plank down my quid
and take up nothing!"

Not that they really are ignorant of _petits-chevaux_ and _roulette_,
of the conventions of continental hotel life or--anything else!  for,
only yesterday, having received but few visitors, one of them took a
camel-hair brush and a bottle of boot-varnish, and deftly inscribed
upon her door the double-zero, and, within the next five minutes----

But the tiny red-brown fishing-boat which has been threading its way
between the pygmean rocky islets in the bay, now touches the beach,
whither I fly to glean new schemes of colour from the glint of the
dying mackerel.

  Tiens, kid,
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE V

EATON SQUARE, _Tuesday, October_ 3_rd._

MY DEAR PATRICIA,--

Let me implore you at the outset to repress the hilarity which any
reasonable person must naturally feel at the sight of a quite
unexpected letter in my familiar handwriting, for I am in no joking
mood to-day.  In short, there have been ructions here; I have read
them the Riot Act with the stringbark on it and locked myself in my
own apartments; for, even if I had entertained no thought of melting
to-morrow before the warm rays of a tear-blotted cheque for the price
of a new dinner frock, there is something so incomparably more
dignified about an exit with dilated nostrils and a defiant snort
than in a meek slink-off in the soul-grilling fit of remorse which is
bound to follow a return to baneful Belgravia from so sweet a living
toy as Dinard.

And what, pray, had _I_ to do with the fact that reliable domestic
servants were not to be got; what (advancing another pace) that, even
when captured occasionally, they rapidly became unreliable in a
household where, when Rio Tinto's stood at 62, an operatic artiste
arose from the floral centre-piece of a banquet served with Roman
splendour and sang the menu, course by course; while, two days later,
when Rio's dropped to one-and-eight a quire, "the Poor's Rates put
in" and pinched the very dining table?  No Countess in the Peerage
who habitually had less than seventy men staying in the house at the
same time could possibly get servants to accept such elementary
principles of give and take!  But it was when Féo rorted me upon my
frequent absences from her house--"her house," my griefs!--that the
proud chieftain's daughter moulted an eagle's feather.

"And a model house it is, madam!" I cried, with the withering
bitterness of the impoverished nobleman whose I.O.U. for
a-pint-and-two-slices had been scorned by the korfy-stall keeper, "a
mighty regular and methodical house!  Its many virtues, too humorous
to mention, lie in the broken decanter at the foot of your
dressing-table, the gold kid Court slipper behind the dining-room
clock, the bottle of Odol on the drawing-room hearthrug; or they are
to seek among the tennis balls in the music case, in the nest of mice
beneath the broken wires of the piano, or in the sanitary dustbin
wherein profane hands deposited my treasured button from Jan
Kubelik's dress waistcoat!  Od's, hog's puddings and hung beef! if
the house round the corner in Lower Belgrave Street of the motherly
old lady in the black satin skirt and the red velvet bonnet, who got
three months last Saturday, was a more 'disorderly' house than this
is, then my reason's twisted and my name's M'Gizzick!"

Here, locked in my vestal chamber which is sufficiently contiguous to
the kitchen to afford that peculiar atmosphere of internecine
culinary warfare familiar to all inhabitants of Flatland, will I dip
into the Diary which I found upon the boat between St Malo and
Southampton, and which, very curiously, refers to the three giddy
gushers of the obscure hotel at deevie Dinard.  It is obviously in
the handwriting of a married man of the middle station, whom a
vagrant generosity would impel to look into shop windows at articles
ticketed "Suitable present for a barmaid" and whom a deeper-rooted
penuriousness would incite to haggle with his wife at parting as to
his share of the expense of framing and glazing the judicial
separation order which she has obtained against him; and, roughly
pencilled in a scribbling book, it runs--


_Monday, Sept._ 1_st._---It is now nine days since any caller other
than a dun or a peddler of washleathers has entered my office, the
last prospective client of good intent having been Mr Asphalte, the
famous turf-accountant from the lamp-post at the corner of
Bucklersbury.  His suggestion that I should receive telegrams on his
behalf, also ninepence in the £ out of the Sender's losings, I
foolishly declined to entertain, over-estimating, probably, the value
of the commission which I had just received from Miss Béguinette
Strathcona, of Broad Court Mansions, to find her a sober and
presentable "mother" for Thursday afternoon next, when she has to
interview the family solicitors of the Earl of Guernsey, who is
settling five thousand a year upon her on condition that she never
misses the last bus, or something.  The young Earl would probably
have married the bird could he have broken her of her artless habit
of joining in the choruses whenever he took her to a music hall;
though the interesting fact remains that what will lose a deserving
girl a nobleman's partnership will not necessarily cost her his
patronage.  But where the brimstone is my personal discomfort to end?
If I attempt to go across to the "Green Man" I shall get a
judgment-summons on the way, and if I don't go across to the "Green
Man" I shall die of thirst; meanwhile--Somebody in the outer office!
Will you step in, please?  Well, well, well!  May I be--er, yours and
so forth; my old chums Billie Bunn and Dickie Scales!  This is the
sort of meeting that makes work for barmen; say, boys, were there any
signs of a seedy old devil with a black leather bag around the
doorway as you came in?  No?  Then all is quiet in the Shipka Pass.
Come across the road!

_Tuesday, Sept._ 2_nd._--My oath! there were no bottle-green winged
insects on last night as a model of a quiet, intellectual little
evening, but--I really do wish that I could rest my head for awhile
on something extremely soft and yet intensely cold.  Rather took
their hind wheels off, I think, by the way I mixed the Moselle cup!
Absolutely astonished myself; though it only shows you what you could
do if you could command the materials.  Am rather taken with the
Run-across-to-the-Republic--(_Vive l'drapeau rouge!_)--notion, too,
and don't see why I _shouldn't_ go as their joint guest, seeing that
they have won an independency at old Ebor; and more especially since
I have volunteered to stake them to three little Broad Court chorus
chicks, neighbours of Béguinette's, that I hear have gone to Dinard.
Heigho!  Had _some_ men but one-fifth of what any successful
stockbroker would consider an absurdly insufficient income, what pure
_jouisseur's_ would some men be; a bit pale in the morn, perhaps, but
growing ripe as luncheon time arrived, and rubicund at eve with the
rubicundity that comes only of repeated "splits."  Funny thing I
should dream only last night that I was counting money!

_Wednesday, Sept._ 3_rd._--The Channel a positive dream--even though
I have to close one eye to make out the shipping with any
distinctness.  We should hear considerably less about "the sinful
artificiality of modern life," if some of the pessimists had, like
myself, an occasional opportunity to make up for lost time.  Man
can't have a "past" if he doesn't possess the cash to overtake it.
My vivid descriptions of the three birds are truly amazing--seeing
that I barely remember one of them!  There's Effie, who used to
correspond regularly with a pal of mine until the G.P.O. people
chipped in and forbade it on the ground that her letters scorched
holes in the mail-bags.  There's Connie, who fairly electrified the
young bloods when she came on with a copper can in the second act of
_Sweet Nancy_, and asked "Hot water, sir?" quite inimitably, and whom
Sir Charles Muckross would have married in spite of his family, but
for the persistency with which Effie's fool of a grey parrot kept on
shouting one evening, "No, Georgie, not to-night!"  Finally there's
the dark one whose name I can't remember, but she's particularly
hunky-perdoodlum, has Spanish blood in her veins--oh, I rubbed it
into them until their only trouble was that they couldn't bribe the
captain of the boat to send the girls a Marconi to get busy with
their curling-tongs and turn up at the ferry to meet us.

_Thursday, Sept._ 4_th._--Dinard.  Déjeuner'd on arrival at the Hotel
Steak and Vedge--no, no, Chateaubriand--where Billie and Dickie sate
and sipped the liqueurs which add so much to autumn's rich content,
whilst I went in search of the birds.  Discovered them at a small
hotel by the Casino, and introduced myself--no blistering task in a
place where you meet a little sideline in the surf at noon, and call
on it at its hotel not more than twenty minutes later; but they're no
sparkling revelations.  So far do they fall short of my word-pictures
painted aboard the boat, that I am fain to invent, on my way back to
the Steak and Vedge, dramatic endings for the fabled Erne, for Connie
from dreamland, for the dark 'un.  She that needed the asbestos
notepaper, I announce, purchased a 200 franc robe-de-nuit, renovated
her visiting cards with benzine, and returned to England yesterday,
her solicitor having called her attention to the fact that the last
of her debts was barred by the statute of limitations on the 30th
ult.; Connie had been sandbagged in error by a near-sighted French
gentleman, who had since taken advantage of the low rates between
Havre and New York to start for America on the day fixed for his
marriage with his landlord's daughter; the dark 'un with the tar in
her system had just entered a convent after secretly wedding an
assistant-something in the Niger Protectorate, who had imprudently
disembarked among a wrong tribe, and been eaten on his honeymoon.
The gorged but affable indifference with which these details are
received by Billie and Dickie is heightened rather than dispelled
when I escort them to call on the blondines, and I begin to regret
that in a febrile, ebullient moment I suggested that their ancient
and moustached landlady--obviously also the Perpetual Lady President
of the Norman Branch of the Anti-Savon and Water Society--might hold
herself in readiness for a little dinner for six at sunset.  The more
so since Heine's dictum that rich men are so unhappy that they need
benevolent institutions to mitigate their misery, breeds no false joy
in the breast of the Bucklers-buryite in Dinard with only
one-and-eight and a feeding appointment with a tall, blonde kid, with
whom he has already exchanged a labial kiss, though assured by her
that if her "people" ever suspected that she done such they would
feel as sore as proselytes to Judaism about it.

_The Same_, 9 P.M.--Two hours have passed since we should have called
and fed the canaries; meantime Billie Bunn has been outed by a
_bouillabaise_ that looked like Westgate at low water, and smelt
stronger than a pearl-fishing lugger, and Dickie Scales has not been
sober since 3.15.  Some philosophy there is which holds that except
to give an order, the greatest sin is to execute it; I do devoutly
trust that Mère Jeanniot, the bearded _hostesse_, is a practical
disciple of this creed; but what of my little prize pansy, Irene
Treadwater?  My brain works luminously enough till the wronged Irene
and the misery of my one-and-eight enter it.  How mutable a thing is
man!  He starteth, bent on opening a bale of Roman orgies on the
noble lines laid down by Petronius Arbiter; he windeth up on streaky
bacon, fried on a shovel in a cabmen's shelter!  I should have known
by now, I must tell Irene, with simulated chafing, that Cupid could
not operate in a crowd; I must make it my personal business to see
that she gets the leading part in one of the best of the coming
provincial pantomimes: I must send her a real Norfolk turkey, also a
motor car, for Christmas.  Heartily sick of the whole business, yet
anxious to get out of it as politely as possible, I leave my feeble
friends and start for the abode of offended beauty.

_Much Later._--I am back from their hotel.  The birds had risen, in
mastodonic wrath, and gone, but--Mère Jeanniot was there.  My
monstrous "might-have-waited" bluff--femininity in its most fatuous
phase--she fathomed at a glance, and conspuez'd (and worse'd) me as
heartily as though I had been the town liar.  Much that she said
outdistanced my Ollendorf, but her text, I gathered from a phrase
here and there, was that axiomatic dictum of the incensed fair, "I
like a man to be a man"; whereupon, angered but always a gentleman, I
shouted, with great restraint, "Shut up, _sale bête_!  I am an
Englishman, and Englishmen perform their promises!"  "Poo-poo!
poo-poo!" snarled the hag, with considerable sarcasm; "if so that be,
where then are your friends, the other Englishmen?"  Countered, I
wavered for an instant, then, reckless in my desperation, I fired the
temporal and banal lie, "Not a bit of it: _they_ were no Englishmen!"
Momentarily her parchment brows were knit, her bristling eyebrows
raised.  "Not Engleeshmen?" cried she, "pray what then were they?"
"AMERICANS!" I cried, with happy inspiration, and for a few minutes
the ogress's revengeful dial relaxed, and my only fear was that she
would embrace me.  But her puzzled look gave way at length: the
shadows gathered again, and she cried, "_A bas, monteur!  Non, non,_
deceive am I not thus to be!  For did not _l'homme Américain_ visite
Mademoiselle Iréne but yesterday, and was not he as is your
_chapeau_, black--_très_, black?  _Decidement, jeune homme, vous
voulez_----."  But I fled; moreover, I leave this mill to-morrow,
grist or no grist.  Dickie Scales is pulling round, and sends to
say----


But here the entry ends abruptly.

Pessimists of the smart set are shaking their heads with
ill-concealed mirth over Lady Hilda Chinewood's diminishing prospects
of ever getting a decree nisi, a speculation into which she has
already heroically socked about three thousand pounds of her winnings
since Goodwood, with little prospect, so far, of securing any return.
For Lord Percy continues to lead a blameless life in the Bloomsbury
garret to which Hilda's dole of thirty shillings a week confines him,
despite the promise, wrung from him with many tears and threats, to
be guilty of the technical "misconduct" which the law insists upon.
With no assets save two pairs of patent-leather boots ready to be
sent to be soled and heeled, he sits and smokes cigarettes all day,
carelessly, unconsciously forcing upon poor Hilda the conviction that
worldly happiness is a wild singing-bird which may not be caught and
tamed.  He certainly refrains, with the gentlemanly consideration of
our common forefather, Adam, from attacking the previous character of
the lady, but he has already jotted down in lead-pencil on the back
of the citation the seven separate grounds of justification which he
intends to plead in defence of his having married her.  And they
are:--

1.  The weather at the time was beastly cold and uncongenial.

2.  The roads were confoundedly sloppy.

3.  Respondent could not afford two guineas a day for a cab; and

4.  Respondent's walking boots admitted water in large quantities.

5.  Respondent's chest was weak, and his doctor had ordered him
"generous living."

6.  Respondent was unable to obtain same, he having signally failed
to get his paper done, even with the endorsements of "A. de
Rothschild," "W. W. Astor," and "A. Carnegie," though he has since
been informed that poor dear old Sam recognised the shade of ink in
use at the "Blue Posts."

7.  Process-servers had at the instance of (1) Messrs Bellamy
Brothers; (2) Messrs Warren and Craik; (3) Messrs Justerini and
Brooks, already penetrated to respondent's bedroom.


Lady Hilda, whose ineradicable habit of making love to every man she
meets has turned out such particularly sour pickles on her, fatuously
imagined that a woman who could hold her own with the bookmakers upon
a racecourse would be more than a match for a lazy, feminine,
Carlylean boy who falls asleep directly after dinner whenever he has
been out in the fresh air during the afternoon, and she took him
against everyone's advice.  At Lincoln they were closer than onions
on a string; but between the Grand National and the Guineas', her
infatuation waned to comparative boredom, and, by Epsom, boredom had
given way to positive loathing.  At Ascot he proved a hopelessly
out-of-date dervish; and she brought him to the London Cup at
Alexandra Park only because she had lately discovered a particularly
smart cabman, called "Mint-sauce Fred," on the Wilton Road rank, and
the man seemed inclined to get too pally.  But the climax came at
Goodwood, where Hilda had looked forward to a very big week, not only
because tips to servants are expected to be lavish, but by reason of
the subsequent draining month's "rest," in which nerves and glands
and organs and muscles have to be renewed, while one is not winning a
single steever.

The mid-day sun had spurred back the morning haze peculiar to the
Southdowns, as Hilda and her marital incubus drove up the hill to
Goodwood, from where Lavant lay buried in the quiet bosom of the
woods.  To any woman whose cheval-glass had spoken as eloquently on
the subject of white serge as Hilda's had done, it should have been a
day, if not of triumph, still of heavenly peace; yet the rapturous
song of the lark and the happy droning of the bees only served to
accentuate the misery of her merciless matrimonial mistake and dangle
it before her eyes.  It was maddening only to think of what she must
endure during the next four days with the highly-necessary bookmakers
on the one hand and the utterly unprofitable mature male suckling on
the other.  When the carriage drew up at the wicket-gate, Hilda was
at boiling point, and, turning to the right and leading the way into
the plantation of elms and beeches, beneath the boughs of which full
half a thousand powdered lackeys unpacked huge hampers of damask
napery and shimmering glass and glistening silver, she cried aloud
with withering scorn to the lord and master she despised:

"Now, dog, which tree will you sit under while I go and get you your
living?"

Stung to the quick, whatever that may be, Percy, like Cambronne,
hissed but a single word; the next instant strong but servile hands
were hauling him out of the wreck of the Duke of Ravensbury's cold
collation, and five score of astonished onlookers realised that if a
hand only does take 5¾ in white suede gloves, it is astounding how
hard and how straight it can hit.  By what subterfuge he, being
practically penniless, contrived to return to town is not known, but
as he was last seen entering a small calico tent on which was legibly
inscribed "ACCOMMODATION," it is reasonable to assume that he had
recourse to these nomadic, but extremely convenient, financiers of
the racecourse for the purpose of raising upon his gun-metal watch a
small sum sufficient to pay his railway fare to London; meanwhile, as
"language" is constructive "cruelty" in the eye of the law, Hilda
will probably pursue Percy on the first day when there is no racing,
and hit him again.

But, speaking of nomads, what an extraordinary vogue the Bond Street
fortune-tellers are enjoying!  Clairvoyantes is, perhaps, the more
acceptable term, though no two of the visionists acknowledge the same
denomination nor pursue the same mystic methods.  Thus, Madame Hagar,
of Grafton Street, poises a crystal ball upon a flower vase, while
Madame la Moravie, of Bruton Street, toys only with the subject's
finger-tips.  Again, Madame Belisardas Brown, of Clifford Street,
psychometrises over a lady's glove, whereas Madame Teresona Topping,
of Cork Street, her sister--(and many believers in the
"blood-thicker-than-water" aphorism readily allow Belisardas and
Teresona to be thicker than both put together)--has been known to
call loudly for, and even detain, a gentleman's trousers.  It is,
after all, the observant and intelligent crossing-sweeper at the
corner who crystallises all the clairvoyancy that has come under his
notice into, "'Ere, it's this way: Laidy arrives in a
bro'um--Interval o' two minnits--Toff drives up in an 'ansom.
'Cleer-voyancy' yer calls it?  Well, I'm---tongue-tied!"

It was as late as half-past eight the other evening, when all the
world was supposed to be at dinner, that Captain Throatlash, the
gallant society playwright who, should his country suddenly require
his presence, would be quite prepared to tread the icy Steppes of
Russia in his dress pumps, ascended Madame Hagar's little dark
staircase in Grafton Street, and awaited with some impatience the
arrival of Lady Constance Edenhall.  Each wished, from perfectly
innocent and dissimilar motives, no doubt, to consult the oracle; the
Captain, possibly, because he had an appalling access of dramatic
work to get through in which the present state of affairs in the Far
East constituted a perpetual menace to his personal peace; Lady
Constance, perhaps, because she feared to order a new evening frock
before ascertaining if it be true that, according to all the bibles,
vedams, and alcorans of the Rue de la Paix, the waist-line is shortly
to vanish entirely.  But Lady Constance was shockingly late; indeed
it was not until 8.49 that the noble Captain, hearing the stairs
squeak, arose quickly from his chair, and pulling open the door
beheld--Lord Huntley Edenhall!

"Hullo, Reggie, old sportsman!" cried his lordship, genuinely
surprised, "why, what the blazes attracts a chap like you to such a
peep-show as this?"

"Fact is, dear lad," replied Reginald Throatlash, "my little woman
left her--er--_umbrella_ either here or elsewhere this morning and I
called in on the off-chance of hearing of it.  Same time I'd have
laid a million to one against meeting you here?"

"Yes--er--well," drawled Lord Huntley, wondering if the kid from
Daly's could possibly have been such a silly little devil, after his
most explicit instructions, as to go to the _other_ Grafton Street in
the wilds of Fitzroy Square; "it's a dam funny coincidence, don't ye
know, but my little missis was here this morning, too, in order
to--er--er, see if the--er, magic ball, could indicate the present
whereabouts of her long lost--er, lucky pig--yes, yes, her _lucky
pig_, and I just dropped in to inquire in what manner the--er,
miraculous crystal had acquitted itself of the mandamus of confidence
she had given it.  But, of course, it's all tommy-rot, isn't it?"

"With all deference, I think _not_," replied Throatlash, with the
impudent reassurance of one who has suddenly spotted the way out of
the maze, "I may, indeed, tell you, quite soberly and seriously, that
I not only believe in, but actually practice, these occult sciences,
and I have already attained sufficient power in them to compel at
will--mark me, Huntley, I say again, compel--the attendance of any
living person within the salt boundaries of the British Isles.  Let
me give you a demonstration: name somebody?"

"G'wan!  You don't mean it, surely?"

"Never was more in earnest in my life: come, name somebody?"

"Right oh, old sporty; take your pick--Hackenschmidt--Tolstoi--that
little girl that keeps the humming-top stall at the Exhibition--the
captain of the _Pinafore_--Marie Corelli--Sunny Jim----"

"Tut, tut!" ejaculated Throatlash, pettishly "I did not invite you to
play the fool."

"Nor did I invite you to take me for one, Throatlash, please remember
_that_!" retaliated Lord Edenhall, hotly.

"I have done nothing of the kind.  I shall proceed, as I said, to
demonstrate----"

"Nonsense, nonsense!" cut in Edenhall.  "You are talking as though
you were the birdcage-man at the music-halls.  Is it intoxication or
indigestion: drink or only a dressed-crab?  Because----"

"It is neither, sir, neither!" shouted Throatlash, "I mean to make
you admit----"

"Don't shout at me, sir," interposed Edenhall, imperiously.
"Remember never to raise your voice to a gentleman unless your house
is on fire."

"I ask your pardon," apologised Throatlash, with magnificent
bitterness; then swallowing his choler with all the desperation of an
emu taking down a football, he bowed like any shopwalker and humbly
begged that, as a parting favour, his erstwhile friend would answer
him one question--one only.  Was the admirable Lady Constance at
present at home at Grosvenor Gardens?

"Not this evening," laughed Edenhall, with amused contempt.

"H'm.  Is it too much of me to ask where she may be?" continued
Throatlash, mildly, yet not without confidence.

"It's twice as much as you had permission to ask," replied Lord
Percy, wearily, "but I don't mind gratifying your vulgar curiosity:
Lady Constance is presiding over a Watercress Mission, at Battersea."

"IS she?" screamed Reginald Throatlash, his bloodshot eyes flashing
their resentment as, throwing up his arms and becoming a human ikon,
he executed a rapid series of cabalistic calisthenics as though he
were drawing from the ceiling itself the invisible fishing-nets of
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.  Then in dramatic tones he cried,
"Approach, Constance Isobel Bobitwell Edenhall!" and before the echo
of his voice had time to die away, or Mother Hagar could withdraw her
affrighted countenance from between the curtains which masked the
inner chamber, a familiar footfall sounded on the creaking stairs
and--in strode the Lady Constance Edenhall!

"_Now_, sir," bellowed Throatlash, rushing up to the beautiful woman
who stood, mute, pale and with dilated eyes, and grasping her chin
before her wholly unaffected stupor should turn to hysterics, "now,
sir, what about your 'drink and dressed-crabs'; now, sir, what are
the extreme odds that you offer about 'the birdcage-man at the
music-halls,' eh?"

"Marvellous!  Stupendous!  I am whacked to the world!" exclaimed Lord
Percy, extending his hand.  "Old friend, I ask ten thousand pardons;
if you have no better place to lunch at to-morrow, will you---

"Softly, softly, do not wake her; we can talk of lunch some other
time," said the magnanimous Throatlash.  "Take her home quietly and
hand her over to her maid, lest the shock affect her brain.
Good-bye."

  Ever of thee,
      VIOLA D.




EPISTLE VI

EATON SQUARE, _Tuesday, Novr._ 3_rd._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

Though there mercifully exists for all who like yourself lack brains,
the consolation of religion, you have too long denied yourself the
diversion of consulting Mother Hagar, for the police called upon her
yesterday; and all that is to be seen in her deserted room to-day is
the ivy garland which she sometimes wore, smiling in pathetic
significance from the dirty hearthstone upon which it fell when the
rough-and-tumble started.  When Hagar assumed her flame-coloured robe
this morning it was, alas! her final assumption; the taking down of
her raven locks, her antepenultimate take-down.  None know definitely
who "put her away"; probably her own recklessness, born of undreamt
of success, was the chief cause.  Her sugared impertinences went down
well enough for a while but she should have been more careful to
master the art of walking on eggs without breaking them before the
gin began to tell on her.  Quite likely is it that her dissolution
was brought about through her foolishly promising some
billowy-bosomed barmaid enjoyments and sensations which are
dogmatically denied to the working-classes; or she may have
carelessly given to some married woman being sued by her
dress-makers, the address of a millionaire who had been three months
dead and buried; or there is yet one other possibility:

I daresay you remember (for the sequel is too long to go into the
preceding sentence) the celebrated cause of Smith _versus_ Smith and
Dounecastle, the reports of which caused more than one bursting
society bud of three seasons ago to recant Rosetti and embrace the
_Evening Standard_?  Also how, as soon as a long-empanelled jury,
that was fading visibly for want of fresh air and red meat with
gravy, had recorded its verdict and, rising as one man, had warmly
complimented Mr Smith on regaining his freedom from wedlock with a
woman with whom marriage was so entirely superfluous, the simple old
peer bigamously married Mrs Smith at a registry office, foolishly
committing perjury for the purpose?  Well, he has since become the
father of two girl babies--at least, so their mother says, but you
never can tell--and as a son and heir was more ardently to be desired
and something of the kind was daily imminent, he last week sought to
ease his mind by consulting Madame Hagar.

Much that she told him--as, for instance, that he would go to the
Empire and meet a tall "spade" girl who had been insulted by her
landlady and was going to move round into Winchester Street as soon
as she could afford it; that, in another large building, of Moorish
architecture, he would speak to a "heart" girl with blue eyes, who
would look ten years worse for wear than when he last saw her in '99,
and she also would allude to money matters, being urgently pressed
for a sufficient sum to bury her deceased mother, to send her invalid
little sister on a sea voyage, and to replace eight pounds belonging
to another girl which the slavey had stolen from the vase on the
mantelpiece; finally, that while riding in a public, white conveyance
towards an _al fresco_ entertainment with military bands and boats,
he would pinch the knee of a perfect stranger and ultimately
undertake a journey with her--was doubtless true, but highly
irrelevant; it is the nature of necromancers, however, to
prevaricate.  Eventually she discerned within the crystal a fleeting
current event, and cried:

"Yes, yes!  All is over--thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; the
gods on high Olympus have once more frosted you from head to
foot--seventeen, eighteen, nineteen; it an another girl!"

"Too bad to be true!  Too bad to be true!" gasped the peer, with a
dreadfully dished look in his eyes as he collapsed into a curule
chair made out of a beer-stand.  "For heaven's sake have another
look, missis?"

In mute obedience, the harridan burnished the crystal globe with her
flannel sleeve and peered into it again, but she only shook her head
dolefully.  Then did a none too opulent son of a marquis, whose
future seemed to consist mainly in populating the burlesque stage of
1922, steer straight for his club, there to wallow in old brandy as
only one can whose simple faith in all mankind has been mercilessly
arm-locked and thrown clear off the mat.

Judge, then, of the Earl's great joy next morning when the club
servant who restored him to consciousness with prussic acid, showed
him in the _Times_ the announcement of the birth of a son!  Imagine
also the righteous ire, unequalled even by that of the pious, but
somewhat deaf, old lady who threw a water-bottle at Nansen for
speaking jokingly of the Equator, with which he started out for
Grafton Street to rate the specious charlatan who had clumsily
condemned him for four-and-twenty hours to alcohol and blank despair!
Nor would the obstinate old thing admit that she was miffed.  Being
without a servant, she said, her globes had not been properly
polished that morning, and, the crystal becoming somewhat
finger-marked and mottled, must account for her making one or two
trifling miscues.  It is not surprising if at boiling point old
Dounecastle petitioned the police to blue-pencil Hagar vigorously.

But necromancy is not the new fad you think it, indeed, I have
wondered for years how a sensible old gentleman like Victor Hugo, the
greatest lyrical poet that France has seen (though some of the more
stiff-necked of the Immortals never could forgive his singing "I'm
living with mother now" at one of their banquets, and then excusing
himself on the ground that the girl looked old enough to be, anyway),
ever could have been a wizard's dupe.  But it now transpires that he
was a mere tool in the hands of the fascinating Comtesse de
Camembert, who, detecting in him unmistakable signs of fatty
degeneration of the cerebrator, got him at the _planchette_, and,
between the Comte, her husband (compelled by his wife to wear a
galvanic belt, and wrathfully attributing it to the poet's
recommendation) pulling in front, and herself shoving behind, they
had poor Victor at loggerheads with his dearest friends nearly all of
the time.  The charming Comtesse, of whom contemporary writers speak
as having been "all there and full measure," and whom the jealous
Comte would probably have divorced had she not been the only woman in
Paris who understood how to cut his corns properly, obtained such
complete control over the cheery old poet that, whenever he received
his quarterly envelope from his publisher, his only way of reserving
it for his own use was to bury it behind the shrubbery, or leave it
in his locker at the Turkish Bath.  Otherwise the delightful lady,
whose great-grandfather (more to the shame of her great-grandmother)
was of royal blood, thought nothing of sending to the Rue de la Paix
for a new lilac _Samedi-à-Lundi_ turn-out, and then crying scornfully
to Victor, as she shoved Virot's bill under his nose, "Have you got
the sand to endorse that?"  Nine times out of ten he did so, for the
Comtesse, tall and slender as a young poplar, was an imposing figure,
when well frocked, for a struggling man of letters to be seen about
with after the bright-lights had dawned and cab fares were doubled;
moreover, the couple had an amiable and economical understanding
between themselves by which she invariably chalked up their little
dinner at Paillard's to her husband, while Hugo's own visiting-card
was always good for two fauteuils at any of the houses where they
were not playing to over much money.

All this was long, long ago, dear, yet many persons believe to this
day in the _planchette_ as a means of increasing the value of
handwriting from a scientific standpoint; indeed, only last July
young Monty Clondalkin (who got his troop at Hounslow after
heroically suppressing a civilian riot, caused by an electric car
conductor's refusal to allow an elderly native lady to ride as far as
Twickenham, without paying full fare for a hive of live bees which
she was carrying in her lap; the man contending that the hive should
have occupied a seat, even if the bees had been left to select their
own seats, or stand; but who, with countervailing misfortune, had to
retire on half pay after being dangerously hit in the antipodes of
his face by a paleozoic boulder from a jingal during the firing of a
_feu de joie_ by our allies at Thibet) was telling us at dinner one
night of a very striking manifestation which he himself had
witnessed.  Knowing that he could catch nothing which he hadn't had
about twice already, he boldly visited in a one-roomed cellar
somewhere off the Euston Road, a certain Madame Ingomar, and, having
straddled the ante, asked how to gain the lasting affection of the
girl he loved and was to meet at Henley.  The reply from the other
world, via _planchette_, ran: "Win a million on Egyptian Beauty at
Alexandra Park, and let her look at it"; and, though he had to lay
eight millions to one on, dear, he brought it off!

This so impressed me with the virtues of the little board that, in
the week before Goodwood, being sick of the sweet sisterhood which
sticks to the Plantation, and yet needing the golden pinions with
which to fly to the Ring, I hunted up dear old Phyllis Waring, who
has made it up with Eustace, and is living in Knightsbridge in a
delightful flat whose back windows overlook the Park, and begged her
to get a _planchette_ between us.  Neither she nor I had the faintest
notion where such things were sold, but after much searching, Phyllis
found one in a small _bric-à-brac_ shop in that queer neighbourhood
which lies between the Royalty and Palace theatres, where
Madonna-like ladies, attired chiefly in white tarlatan chemisettes,
peep out of upper windows, and where black bearded men loll about the
doorways of little pink and gold restaurants as though perpetually
waiting for something to happen.  Did not the Reverend Somebody, of
the Church and Stage Guild, once have a chapel here in which the
choristers appeared in tights?  I fancy so.

Anyhow, Phyllis no sooner got it home than she summoned me to inspect
it--a small wooden disc, dear, resembling nothing so much as an
artist's palette.  For an alleged novelty, it struck me as being
rather soiled and dusty, but Phyllis assured me that we had the
veritable thing; that the ancients knew it well, the two best
remembered apothegms of Terence being "You can always make a market
with a bear _planchette_," and _Actum ne agas_, or, "Don't overdo
it."  Upon a small table placed in the centre of the room, Phyllis
deposited the little board and switched off the electric light.  For
several minutes an awful and oppressive stillness reigned, broken
only by a faint, half-stifled feminine voice exclaiming, "You _will_
marry me, won't you?" which Phyllis said came from the Park at the
back, and was no part of the séance whatever.  Slowly, very slowly,
the moments dragged along; then presently there came a slight sound
as of a penholder tapping on a pill box, and Phyllis said, hoarsely
and in sepulchral tones:

"The spirit of Madame Rachel asks the loan of an ear.  She might as
well bowl her hoop without wasting our time, I think; what with
electric rollers and frown plasters we've got her ticketed as a
mummy?"

I nodded assent, and many more moments of silence elapsed, followed
by a grating noise as of the run down of a musical box.

"According to the old woman at the shop," said Phyllis, "the spirits
notify that it's up to us to tilt back to them."

"Do they take this for a jackpot?" I asked, quite inoffensively.

"Never mind what they take it for," snapped Phyllis, "let us get them
to give us an option in something on the Stock Exchange that is going
to go a bit higher."

"Oh, fiddles to _that_!" said I, having no more desire to know
anything of the kind than How-to-tell-the-gas-meter, illustrated by
diagrams.  "Rather get them to slip us the winner of the Steward's
Cup?"

Sullenly, Phyllis amended her pleadings and submitted my question.
In about five minutes, during which period the low plumbean purring
of a marking-pencil was distinctly audible, there came the click
which denotes the termination of a message, and Phyllis, snatching up
the prize, carried it out into the light.  Bristling with joyous
anticipation, I followed, but only in time to hear her swear and see
her smash the wooden thing across her knee and pitch it out of the
window on to the moonlight prowlers in the Park.

"You were quite right about that dust, Vi," she said, sourly.  "I
have been lumbered on to a fake that was timed to strike seventeen
years ago.  The thing napped 'Crafton, win and shop!'"

Did I tell you, I wonder, in my last how those awful people, the
Invernairne's, had fallen out again?  Everyone is saying how worn and
rundown she is beginning to look, and how much better it would be if
only she could go away for a time.  I don't mean to one of those
dreadful places where seemingly intelligent old gentlemen caterwaul
and hide themselves in mignonette beds, and perfectly blameless old
ladies disrobe suddenly at the dinner-table and weep copiously into
the soup tureen, because they are not as pure and unsullied as new
milk-cans, but to some nerve-restoring retreat where she could
recuperate without having strangers stare holes in her.  Poor Maisie!
when she married the middle-aged Invernairne she was quite one of the
wits of the smart set, and, if not exactly a belle of letters
herself, she had received many and many a bushel from the beaux of
literature, principally respecting appointments.  Never an ardent
advocate of the tied-house system, her cultured soul and innate good
taste had rebelled against the constant and vulgar propinquity of
matrimony, which she had endeavoured to vary by bolting on seven
different occasions with men who were all that could be desired,
socially.  Her prosaic husband had followed her up on each occasion,
however, and, begging her to give marriage a fair and dispassionate
trial, had brought her back again and again, until her once pellucid
spirit became crushed and broken, and she was no more fun to talk to
than a Trappist.

Quite lately she imported from Lausanne a tall, dark Swiss maid who
had repented of some early rashness, and vowed that her future life
should be one unending struggle against the promptings of nature.
Gowned demurely in some simple clinging material which, as the
_Family Herald_ says, accentuated rather than hid her graceful
outline, Fanchon flitted lightly and swiftly up and down the
Invernairne staircases, save when the Earl detained her on a landing
to tell her how nicely her new bodice fitted her.

One fine morning at breakfast, the Earl remarked that as his
physicians and also his bankers had ordered him to visit a lumber
camp in Norway, he feared that he might not be back until the
following day, and he felt it was an excellent opportunity, he said,
for Maisie to go to bed at the same hour as the canaries, and have a
real good rest.  Then he called loudly to his man not to forget to
pack his snowshoes, his caribou gun, plenty of ground bait for the
trout, and disinfectants for the riper ryper, and took his departure.
That selfsame night, in about the middle watch, poor Maisie, sleeping
lightly and nervously, fancied that she heard the stairs creak in a
guilty way, and tremblingly got up.  Slipping into a tight-fitting
lace dressing-gown with three deep flounces shooting boldly from
below the knees, she crept out upon the stairs in time to see a
familiar form, plainly silhouetted in the moonlight, just one flight
above her, and still climbing.  Invernairne had clandestinely
returned!

Though Maisie entertained no Victorian views regarding the fidelity
of husbands, and even knew that in clubland several men who had
lately allowed their hearts to be true to their Polls, had been
expelled on the ground that their conduct was unbecoming gentlemen,
the situation seemed so promising of advantage to herself that she
instinctively followed the figure, keeping close to the wall, where
stairs are quietest.  Precisely at the point anticipated, the
spectral Invernairne crossed a landing and laid his hand softly upon
the knob of the long suspected door.  As the handle slowly turned and
the door, opening inwards, suffered a strong shaft of light from a
cheerful, crackling fire to cleave the darkness--Maisie, poor,
impulsive fool, shouted imperiously, "STOP!"

Invernairne, with man's inborn craft, stopped instantly, and
accurately grasping the situation, acted without a moment's pause.
Stopping dead upon the threshold of the girl's room, he shouted into
it angrily:

"How _dare_ you burn my coals in this way, you abandoned hussy?
Douse that fire with your water-jug immediately, and prepare yourself
for a bitter reckoning to-morrow!"

Then, turning back towards the stairs, he gasped the old Criterion
gag, "My wife!"

"And pray what brings you here to-night?" Maisie asked, by this time
realising how completely she had sacrificed the position to her own
impetuosity.

"Economy, my love, sheer economy," replied the ready liar.  "Found,
when I got to Hull, that the Wilsons owned the boats and the fare was
seven pounds.  Far better spend the seven pounds on dear Maisie,
thought I, and write to the Wilsons to send me a complimentary
pass--perpetual free pass, in fact--besides, the Wilsons would never
speak to me again if they ever heard of such a thing as my paying to
travel by their line--preposterous!  Back then I came--worn, weary,
jaded, but self-satisfied--only to behold, on approaching the beloved
goal, the unmistakable reflection in the clouds of a huge fire
somewhere in my own dwelling.  What great good fortune that I had
turned back!  How Providence provides!  I adopted my old trapper
tactics--stalking stealthily--from crest to crest--birchbark and
woodcraft--aha!  And blest if that Swiss hoyden of yours hadn't got a
fire half way up her chimney, madam, and Cockerell's charging me
thirty-five shillings a ton!  Out of this house she goes to-morrow
morning, mark that!"

"May the Lord have mercy on your miserable soul!" was all that Lady
Invernairne could say as, trembling with suppressed agitation, she
motioned him to the spare room and, a moment later, locked him in.
And now the very natural question is What, oh What, will the Harvest
be?

I really cannot conclude without thanking you for the hearty laugh
you gave me by your humorous inquiry about my "going to the Lord
Mayor's Show" next Wednesday.  You have evidently not forgotten, dear
soul, that the feeblest manifestation of the undying spirit of
Thackeray's Jenkins never fails to move me to laughter; but really I
prefer to leave to you and your sort the fragrance of the asphalte
and the watermen's garments, also the fat and greasy citizens in furs
and chains.  Fortunately, like the pigs in France which have, since
Villon dreamt he was a swine rooting in the streets of Paris, had to
keep outside the fortifications, these dear old civic creatures are,
like the pigs, only brought into these regions to be bled; and I will
wager a fiver that when the worthy alderman who assisted Féo at her
flower stall at the last bazaar is taken round to Dover Street
to-morrow, he will bow to my opinion that she has not spent the last
three weeks getting pinned up in fitting-rooms for nothing!

  Thine
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE VII

THE LADIES' RAG, _December_ 3_rd._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

All day long there has been ringing in my ears the immortal
observation of the extremely fastidious and highly cultured damsel
who remarked, you may remember, as she finished her first
riding-lesson, "M'yes, the sensation is agreeable enough, but the
motion is highly ridiculous," for my morning mail is mainly of those
who are hunting the fox.  Housed in the Honourable Winnie Brandon's
admirable hunting box--the adjective is justified by her many
excellent domestic rules, one of which, for instance, is to have a
loud gong sounded in the hall at ten minutes to six each morning, so
that when the servants bring up the cups of tea at six precisely,
they may find the guests all in their proper rooms and sound
asleep--at Melton, are some of the smartest people that ever publicly
strained at the most insignificant gnats and privately swallowed the
most enormous camels.  Not the least noteworthy among her guests is
Lady Sheila Crampton, who since she got to learn the truth about her
husband's audacious acquaintance with the Honourable Win, has
assiduously made an intimate friend of her, though whether with a
view to cut out in her own spouse's affections the beautiful Diana,
or to effect an economy by the cheaper and easier method of watching
one person instead of paying detectives to keep an unflagging
look-out on two, has not yet been decided in eggshell china circles.
Winnie is, to say the least, dreadfully "raw" over the business,
though less so, in another sense, than Sheila, who, being
unaccustomed to so much occupancy of the saddle, metaphorically moans
in mauve ink for a recipe for restoring lost leather.  If hot and
then cold water, and tincture of myrrh, with a final top-dressing of
zinc ointment, will not toughen her cuticle like a sjambok, then has
Bermondsey lost her bearings and the fabled jolly tanner his art; but
what of the lovers meanwhile?  Finding it no longer necessary to
outdistance the poor, unpractised lady and her equally bothered
horse--"a-blowin' like a pair o' June brides," as the first said to
the second whip--they may flirt along side by side to the great
amusement of the field and the making of much new history.

And Melton has not yet satisfied itself as to what it was that caused
the Honourable Winnie to miss her hunting for the first five weeks of
last season, though, with truly ingrowing nerve, it has sought for a
whole year to pry open the inscrutable.  All it knows is that it saw
on one Autumn evening of twelve months ago, a groom with a petrified
countenance ride out from the stables of Brandon Towers and through
the town, to return, more than an hour later, with the eccentric Dr
Moxon from Swanzey Constable.

Though a bunch of five local practitioners, striving to fill out a
six-day week, mutely resented the intrusion, old Dr Moxon continued
to ride into Melton every afternoon thereafter on the
fifteen-year-old pony which was almost beyond its office.  With the
second week he started sporting a white vest, and a neighbouring
parson with elderly daughters thought seriously of asking him to
dinner; but none were quite bold enough to risk a throw-down, and the
mystery of Brandon Towers remained unsolved.  Five weeks later, as
the philosophic old doctor was making a hearty breakfast off a cold
grouse which was dead enough to call for disinfectants, a servant
announced Lord Willoughby de Sambre, and was in fact followed into
the little dining-room by that breezy nobleman.

"Beg a thousand pardons for disturbin' you with the nosebag on, sir,"
said the peer, whose lachrymal glands indicated early transactions
with brandy and soda, "but I've called to thank you very heartily for
all you have done for Lady Brandon, and to ask you to accept this
little cheque.  Above all, I don't want it known what's been the
matter with her; do you mind recording it in your books as small-pox?
Thanks, awfully!  There's one other little matter, sir.  Lady
Brandon--to whom I'm, ahem, closely related--tells me your old pony
is none too efficient.  Now, I'm putting on the rail to you a little
red Daimler which will buzz you round and keep you more in touch with
events.  No--no thanks, you'll get it to-morrow; don't
forget--smallpox!"

And Lord de Sambre vanished.  Next day, a glistening little
spark-waggon, as red as sealing-wax, arrived, and old Dr Moxon there
and then christened it, lest he might forget his benefactor's last
request, "VARIOLA," and wheeled it into his stable.

As he was in the act of recrossing his garden in the direction of his
surgery, the elderly medico beheld a tall, military man with a frozen
smile alight from the station fly and advance towards him, hat in
hand.

"Ah, my dear Doctor Moxon," he cried, "this is lavender indeed for
me!  Pray accept this small cheque, miserably insufficient as it is,
for all your goodness towards Lady Brandon, my--er, sister-in-law.
It's like violating every principle of gratitude from A to Z to ask a
further favour of you, but _do_ you mind bein' mum--absolutely
G.H.!--as to the exact nature of Lady B.'s indisposition?  Could you
refer to it as--say bile or green cussedness of some sort?  She is
awfully sick, by the way, at your having to cover the Cosmos on a
perambulating organism too far gone to stand doping, and I'm sending
you--oh, fie, fie, I shall take no denials!--a little Panhard that'll
skim round the corners like the pictures on the screen.  Not a word,
not a word; it'll be here to-morrow; but remember--headachy sickness
an' all that caper!"

Long after the stranger had taken his departure, the good old doctor
in his temporary perplexity scratched the shining pate which offended
Nature had tonsured at 69 to resent the overwearing of the halo in
all weathers, and gazed at the cheque which still lay where it had
fallen on the floor.  He could salve his conscience, he reflected, by
destroying the superfluous draft; but with the entrancing little
green tonneau which a railway rustic delivered at the door next
morning, it was entirely different.  So winsome was the diminutive
car, with its fluted varnished bonnet, its bravely burnished lamps,
and its intricate and interesting steel gear, that no soul only
lately converted to automobilism could possibly have returned
it--even had not the princely donor countered even that feasibility
by scrupulously concealing his identity.  So Doctor Moxon accepted
the situation with the sigh of a philosopher, and, naming the green
car "CHLOROSIS" as if by a happy inspiration, he strolled out into
the quiet churchyard to try and forget all about the beautiful Lady
Brandon among the quaint obituary puffs of the old tombstones.

Returning, much relieved, he was surprised to find a genial elderly
gentleman with a ripston-pippin face and silk-lined clothes, sitting
demurely in the cottage surgery and earnestly endeavouring to become
deeply interested in Burckhardt's _Atlas of Electric Cystoscopy_.

"Doctor Moxon, I presume?" said this bland person, laying Burckhardt
aside as the old physician entered; and, receiving an affirmative
nod, continued: "Of course, my dear sir, you haven't the faintest
notion as to who I may be, but it will suffice for me to tell you
that I was--er, eh--yes, yes, Lady Brandon's former ward in
Chancery--eh, no--tut, tut, how very foolish!--I mean, of course,
that she was _mine_--egad, bless her heart, yes!--and--er, in that
case, you will readily understand how deeply grateful I must feel
towards the Galenian genius to whom she probably owes life itself
to-day.  Meantime, my dear Doctor Moxon, there are one or two
reasons--purely private and family reasons--why the world at large
should remain in ignorance of the precise nature of Lady Brandon's
indisposition, and I feel sure that you will respect them--aye, that
you will even waive personal veracity as well as professional
etiquette to oblige a very delightful and charming woman, and--er,
eh--be good enough to inform the curious that she has simply been
suffering with a very aggravated attack of--er, toothache!"

"Really, sir----"

"Pray don't interrupt me, doctor!" cried the pippin, warming with
enthusiasm; "but it occurred to dear Lady Brandon in all her dental
agony--ha-ha, ho-ho!--that your slight, but not inconsiderable, delay
in responding to her summons was solely attributable to the poverty
of your horseflesh.  Now, my dear sir, you mustn't be offended at
what I am about to say, but what were formerly luxuries for the few
are now necessities for the many, and what a country doctor surely
needs is a swift and reliable motor-car.  It fortunately happens----"

"Inexplicable!  Do you know, sir----"

"Pray allow me to finish--more especially since dear Lady Brandon
seems to have so accurately divined your necessities.  It fortunately
happens that, being seldom out of town, I have recently given up my
12 h.p. De Dion world-beater and gone in for a landaulette; but her
ladyship no sooner mentioned your old pony than I sent the De Dion to
Barker's, who have refitted it with a delightful custard-coloured
brougham body precisely in Lord Lonsdale's style, and therefore just
the very thing to carry you about a hunting country.  It should be
here this very evening, and if you will do me the honour to
accept----Good gracious, the poor gentleman is overcome!  Clearly the
tension of the past five weeks has been too much for him.  Hi,
there--without; come to your master's assistance, somebody!  Here,
you, my good woman, apply the usual restoratives and--and I will see
him at some other time!"

Like the gentle, medicinal soul that she was, possessing an
infallible cupboard-remedy for everything between moths and malaria,
the doctor's housekeeper got the old boy round again by the evening
and sent him to the "Lamb" to stand round at bottle pool as fit as
hands could get him, but he wandered up to the station instead and
got there just in time to see the yellow De Dion being unloaded from
a trolley, under the personal supervision of the husky old
stationmaster who had not taken a day off duty in thirty-four years.
Privileged by long acquaintance, this venerable youth got off one or
two satirical cracks about cert'in people a-goin' ahead lately, and
it allus was them as had it as pleaded poverty the loudest--neither
of which vulgar personalities would have made the least impression on
the amiable healer had not the man in blue and braid wound up with,
"An' only this afternoon, when the 4.57 stopped here, His Grace the
Duke o' Croxton himself calls me to the carriage-door to ask me
whether you calls your house 'Oakham Lodge' or 'Oakham Villa,' as he
wants to write to yer to go and see him!"

The mere idea that a live Duke was pining for an audience with him
caused Austin Moxon to stop growing for several minutes.  He had no
reason whatever to suspect that the Duke was even aware of his
presence on earth, and he thought it equally unlikely that his Grace
had, after a quarter of a century, discovered who it was that, for
sheer sports sake had kept chi-iking "Lou-der!" during the ducal
effort at the local political meeting in '79.  Musing on these things
and the gratifying fact that the stationmaster was too hopelessly a
fool to be guilty of a joke on any subject, Austin Moxon sought
counsel in the excellent old brown brandy at the "Lamb"; though with
grateful memories of his pippin-faced visitor and his agitated
entreaties, he went not to bed until he had seen the yellow
"toothache" car housed safely in his stables and had bestowed upon it
the fitting cognomen "ODONTALGIA."

* * * * * * *

"I ask your Grace to pardon my unpunctuality," stammered the
overwhelmed doctor, on being shown, two days later, into the cream
and gold library at Croxton Castle at exactly three minutes after the
hour named in the Duke's summons, "but a slight accident detained me
on the way.  I earnestly hope that my lateness has caused no
inconvenience?"

"It has so seriously disturbed my arrangements, not to mention my
peace of mind," replied the Duke, pleasantly, "that I had not yet
noticed it.  But I hope that it was but a slight accident, doctor?"

"So colourless and conventional an affair, your Grace," Doctor Moxon
hastened to say, "that--er--that it is difficult, if not impossible,
for me to imagine its parallel, I assure you."

"Dear me!" exclaimed the Duke, impressed by this comprehensive
disavowal, "then pray what may it have been?"

"My horse put his foot into a rabbit-hole, fell, broke his neck, and
died upon the spot, sir," blurted the doctor.

No sooner did he hear his own words than Dr Moxon realised the
absurdity, the incongruity of his previous denial; but he was wholly
unprepared for the remarkable effect which they produced upon the
Duke.  That illustrious person twisted his body so suddenly in his
chair that his pince-nez fell to the floor, and, staring excitedly at
the doctor with an utterly incomprehensible expression of delight
tempered by solicitude, he cried:

"Splendid!  Couldn't have been better!  What a singularly opportune
and fortunate circumstance!"

This was a poser!  What could the Duke mean?  Did he design to chide
nonsensical servility by an assumption of supreme irony, or had his
mental balance really been upset by such a juxtaposition of
dissimilars coming from a presumably responsible medical man?

"Forgive my exuberance, doctor," continued the Duke, more seriously,
"and be good enough to draw your chair a little more this way.
That's it.  Now, you were sent for the other day by a--ahem, a valued
tenant of mine, whose horse had given her a rather bad fall in the
hunting-field and bruised her pretty severely----"

"I have no recollection of the case whatever!" interposed Moxon,
innocently enough.

"Probably not, sir, probably not," the Duke added, with a broad smile
and a distinctly plebeian wink, "but as a gallant gentleman you will,
I feel sure, permit my diagnosis to supersede your own.  You would, I
am firmly convinced, cheerfully die in defence of the austere
morality, the impeccable reputation, the obdurate purity of any one
of the adorable creatures who periodically grace these parts during
the hunting season, and in whose fair hands St Anthony himself would
have been as potter's clay.  We will, therefore, please, say it was a
severe, uncompromising bruising which lately affected Lady Winifred
Brandon----"

"Number four!" gasped Moxon beneath his breath.

"But that is not the point, which rather is that although, like the
immortal Gilpin, you rode with speed--the best of which your grey
dobbin, whose loss I formally deplore, was capable--there was
necessarily far more delay than if you had driven over on a
motor-car.  This reflection, and a sense of gratitude to you for your
care of my--er, my valued tenant--yes, yes, my valued tenant, impel
me to ask you to accept as a little present, a very pretty
four-cylinder Darracq, just come from Suresnes, which----"

But Dr Moxon had staggered to his feet, his brain reeling with the
drawing of many psychological conclusions, and he moved in a dazed
way and emitting choking noises towards the open French window.  A
few turns round the Italian garden served to revive him; but how
could he go back?  How could he ever face the Duke after making such
an irrational exit?  Thus absorbed, he crept through the quickset
hedge, and took the route through the woods to his home, arriving
with burrs in his hair and garter-snakes in the folds of his
trousers.  Next day there arrived the bruise-blue Darracq, now known
as "ECCHYMOSIS"; since when the overstocked doctor has assiduously
advertised the machines on the thirteenth page of the _Telegraph_ as
duplicate wedding presents with all the familiar
allurements--Sacrifice, Unused, Approval before Payment, etc.--and
much against the advice of his prudent housekeeper, who sanguinely
predicts a transference to London and a garage in Long Acre, if only
Lady Winifred hunts from Melton for another season.

I am so pleased to hear, dear, that your sister Aenid's baby is going
on so nicely, though, never even having had the sinister finger of
suspicion directed at me, let alone possessed a baby of any kind, I
have not even a passing notion of what they should endure and what
escape before appearing in public.  Reports of cases presenting
specially interesting symptoms usually are concealed by publication
in the "Mother's Corner" of the _Kennel Gazette_, I believe; the
mothers themselves being mysteriously counselled with regard to their
dietetical errors in feeding their offspring, in such cryptic
sentences as "Stop the B.F. diet and report in a month," or, "Give
baby the shredded pin-feathers of a young onion before retiring, and
lie her on her other side."  Nor can I express an opinion as to
whether your sister's nurse's panacea for the pain in your sister's
baby's stomach was good or otherwise, since, on reference to the huge
old book of pasted-in recipes for every ill allied to maternity,
which Féo once conscientiously kept up, I find that the point was
raised, but not settled, in the celebrated Salisbury Baby Claimant
case some years ago.  As you may or may not have read, a witness
named Jane Lawrence deposed that after the birth of the child she
gave her sister some weak brandy and water.  She also gave the baby
some butter and sugar (laughter).  It was the usual custom, she said,
to do so.

Mr Justice Hawkins asked Mr Jelf whether that was so.

Mr Jelf appealed to his learned friend, Mr Dickens, whether that was
_not_ so.

Mr Dickens had received no instructions upon the point; in fact, he
protested that he knew nothing about it.

Thereupon Mr Justice Hawkins said that the case must clearly be
adjourned till eleven o'clock on the following morning.

Immediately beneath this cutting there appears in pencil: "Gt.
Eastern Handicap, Amandier, Missal, Royal Mask.  Twelve ran"; not
that any affinity could possibly exist between the two events.

Marshall has just brought to me an imperious command to join Lady
Thursa Rosacre at Lowndes Square in twenty minutes' time to mote to
Brighton, her husband, probably considering his freedom cheap at the
sacrifice, having lent her his car for the week on condition that she
drives it herself.  An atmosphere of steam is a daily necessity of
life to the Rosacres; and I daresay you remember how, when the
Zoological Society proposed to send its leading elephant on tour to
help expenses, how Thursa drove straight off to the offices in
Hanover Square, and offered to ride the dear pachyderm three times
round Regent's Park on the Saturday afternoon before Ascot, attired
as Lady Godiva--purely in the cause of charity, of course.  She
reckoned it would bring in, she said, enough money to keep the Zoo
out of the hole for two hundred years at least, if, indeed, it didn't
create such a stampede at the turnstiles that such points as
Gloucester and Clarence Gates would be over a week burying their dead.

But motoring in December is too dishevelling, and the bud who has
ridden fifty-two miles in the teeth of a dust-storm and held her life
in her hands one-hundred-and-twenty-seven distinct times between
Piccadilly and Pyecombe, makes about as effective an entrance into
Brighton as the last stone-bruised idiot in the shopboys' annual
walk.  And while Reginald Rosacre is none too deft in handling his
own car, one really needs, to ride beside Thursa, nerves equal to
those of the racing gentleman who, on his way back from the Slough
railway accident, shot seventeen pigeons running in a £5 sweepstakes,
but was partially paralysed and completely prostrated by shock when
the railway company's doctor called on the following morning to
ascertain the extent of his injuries.  Why, was not it only in August
last, dear, that she and he and the dandy chauffeur sustained their
memorable break-down on this very road?  Did not they start out, on
one of those gummy, thunder-laden evenings, when the ceaseless
ambition for sleep is only thwarted by the pestiferous attentions of
the insects which everywhere abound, and fiercely attack all
unprotected flesh with their little spiked shoes, to run down to
Brighton and empty their lives of everything but petrol until
Doncaster?  And what happened?

Along about the middle watches of that night, when only a white
streak marked the road and the travellers were exchanging the
luscious dews of Surrey for the first suggestions of the salt
sea-fret of Sussex, that car, which was popularly supposed not to
know what a hill was, even if you showed it one, gave three spits and
a conquassative tremor and came to a sudden stop.  All in vain did
the dapper stoker key-up this and tighten that, and pour fresh
bituminous drinks carefully over the thing's appalling thirst; to no
effect did Lord Reginald Rosacre unload the astounding anthology of
profanity which he had at great pains acquired from one of the most
celebrated of the three hundred million professors of the art in
Asia; as a vehicle of progression that car was 99 in 100 behind a
crippled goat.

Through a hole in a hedge that hemmed about a redskin-flourball
pasture, the two men pushed and butted the inoperative box of
cylinders, Thursa, with her skirts held knee-high to elude the agile
and amatory potato-bug, looking on with an air of persecuted
resignation.  She was elegantly dressed, as all women whose beauty is
due more to art than inheritance invariably are; and Balzac's crude
old line which, sterilised and disinfected, says that men love not
the woman, but the woman's clothes, arose with unpleasant
suggestiveness in Reginald's mind whenever he thought of going in
search of succour, and leaving the chauffeur to look after Thursa.
Equally impracticable did it seem to send forward Balzac's compatriot
of the cigarette-fingers and the steering-wheel, since he spoke no
language but his own; so ultimately the fair, over-dressed child-wife
had to be left at the mercy of the bugs with many misgivings, but
definite instructions to sound a loud horn should danger seem
impending.

Four miles and a quarter further on, there reposed in a Sleepy Hollow
ten cottages, a baker's, a harness shop, and a Georgian inn; but
Reginald Rosacre died ten deaths in reaching it.  The first streaks
of dawn were coming from between the quaint old sixteenth-century
bungalows on Hogg's Hill and falling on his lordship's left cheek,
all grimy and grey with dust, as he staggered up to the tavern's
oaken door and rapped upon it with a long steel monkey-wrench.  A
horse and trap--no matter at what cost--would still get them into
Brighton ere most folks were up.

"Oho, there!  Within, within!" he cried, lambasting the brave ilexian
door with his puny implement.

A window sash, immediately above his head, was raised noisily, and a
red-faced, half-awakened man looked out and asked what the future
torment was the matter.

"Say, have you any flys heah?" cried Lord Rosacre.

"Millions an' millions of 'em, damyer!" roared the irate innkeeper,
really using a much coarser objurgation.  "But we don't buy our
fly-papers in the middle o' the gory night!  Take that!"

And, catching up two huge flower-bowls, or something, in the liquid
contents of which some such pungent stalks as those of mignonette or
wallflower had been stagnating for a week or more, he drenched his
unexpected visitors as freely and liberally as, in the wild old days
on the Euphrates, the magnificent Lucius Verus did his guests when he
emptied murrhine vases filled with nard upon their heads before being
carried up drunk to bed in a coverlet of camel-hair.

No, Marshall, say please that I have gone to Turkey to gather arum
lilies.

  Thine, dear,
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE VIII

BUCKTHORN MANSE, SURREY, _January_ 6_th._

MY DEAREST PATRICIA,--

When you ingenuously asked in your refreshingly-conventional Yuletide
rigmarole whether I duly suspended my stocking on Christmas Eve and,
if so, what I got out of it, you were actuated more, I believe, by a
vapid desire to appear "seasonable" than by a spirit of idle inquiry
as to whether I had sensibly cloven the continuity of a ghastly
practice; but in either case it cheers me greatly to be able to
inform you that, though my shins are still covered with woven brown
silk to a point that is defiant of criticism, I really _did_ find it
convenient to hang up my enamelled garters for a tenner, and, thanks
to subsequent investments at the Buckthorn Park New Year's Hunt
Meeting, that sum has been multiplied sevenfold.  A hunt meeting _per
se_ would mean less than nothing to you, dear, but when one is
staying, as I am, with the people who are the breath in the nostrils
of the whole thing, one becomes a part of the meeting itself and
appreciates with a new perception the points which previously were
unseen or unrecognised.  Unlike such foxy fixtures as Ascot and Epsom
and Goodwood, where the roguery of the owner is too often reflected
in the reluctance of the racehorse, an atmosphere of probity and
rectitude envelops the hunt meeting and inspires its votaries to
pursue the same policy of frank, unbuckled integrity and veracious
candour by which alone it sternly silences the ever-ready tongue of
scandal.  Not as in flat-racing, where all is whispered and
inscrutable, there is no concealment here from first to last--from
the titled stewards meeting in the lavatory regularly before each
race to equitably arrange the rates of betting; the humane trainers
giving their horses a refreshing bucket of water apiece before
sending them to the starting-post; the returning jockey of the winner
pulling up without dismounting at the paddock bar and taking three
large, courage-giving drinks and a pork pie before going in to scale;
and finally the principal bookmaker driving off the course in a
dogcart behind the hot favourite who was so unfortunately left at the
post in the opening event.  To me the whole thing is completely
bewitching, for though, in the absence of trains reserved exclusively
for the use of "Club" members, one may have to travel in the company
of persons whose knowledge of attenuated English classics is limited
and whose conversations, even when ostentatiously suppressed, are
distinctly not anæmic, there is ample compensation to be had in the
overheard narrative of the drinking of strong wines from reeking
gourds, to say nothing of the conversational "pointers" which
accompany it.  How I should _love_ to stay in the dining-room with
the men to-night whence all (the petticoats) but I had fled, to, like
a gramophone, repeat this memoir of my journey down:

"Did ye 'ear about Bill Willis an' Tom Reeder a-goin' to Plumpton,
George?"

"Which Bill Willis d'ye mean, 'Arry; him as set the old woman on the
fire at Doncaster?"

"No, no; not him.  The Bill Willis what the doctor in the Sunday
paper told to eat a raw inion at each meal--him as they used to call
'Ev'ry-Morn-I-Bring-Thee-Vi'lets'?"

"Oh, _him_!  Why, what happened to 'em?"

"They set out about a week ago to carry on the noble work at Plumpton
Steeplechases, an', as both felt as they could do with a bit of a
change, they arranges to stop 'private' in Brighton, at a little case
in Black Lion Street where Tom Reeder annually took his old woman
every August.  It's not by no means a fash'nable lodgin' for society
ducks--in fact, as showin' that the lan'lady wasn't expectin' winter
lodgers, Bill and Tom found as she'd been snowballin' the layout, or
in other words, stuffin' all the settin'-room furniture, with that
chemical moth-stuff what looks like candles but hums like as if the
gas was turned on.  There was only one bedroom, too, but it had a
brace o' kips in it as well as a big double wardrobe for to 'ang yer
clothes in; in every respec' as good a place as a man need want, and
all comin' at a figure that didn't compel ye to give the lan'lady the
frozen face on the last day o' the meetin' unless things went _extra_
kerteever.  You follow me, George?"

"Abso-pleadin'-lutely, 'Arry.  Well?"

"Well--but you know what Brighton is, George; the wettest part o' the
glorious place lies north o' the beach, not south.  You stroll along
the front fully intendin' to give yer old liver a good washin' in
Schilling's beautiful natural sel'zer water, an', before you're half
way to the Metropole, you've done eight or ten splits, a pint o'
stout along o' the oysters what you've 'ad at the little shop behind
the Star an' Garter, so many gins-an'-bitters that yer stomach,
originally humbugged into believin' it was a-goin' to have a square
meal, refuses to take any further notice of 'em, a stray slosh o' bay
rum where you got shaved in Ship Street, two or three drops o' that
stuff as you took when the doctor told yer to do all as you could to
be sick--

"Ver-mooth."

"Aye, ver-mooth; an' by the time you oughter be half way to the
racecourse you're still a-lookin' for a conveyance round about Castle
Square, an' a-gapin' to such an extent that street boys comes up to
you an' offers to show yer the chemist's shop in East Street where
they sells the infallible yawn drops.  But there's one thing I _will_
say for the Brighton atmosphere: you seem to pull yerself round again
just as quick as you seemed to get oiled--consequently Bill Willis
an' Tom Reeder spent a thoroughly enj'yable an' int'lectual week of
it."

"I'm sure!"

"Any'ow, on the Saturday mornin' just about nine o'clock, Bill
marches into the 'Swan' in Ship Street with his tongue a-feelin' like
a ash-heap an' literally a-gaspin' for his mornin's mornin'.  Now the
'Swan' in Ship Street is a sort of 'ome-from-'ome for families an'
sportsmen visitin' Brighton, an' from goin' there so frequent like,
both Bill an' Tom had come to know the manager.  So, as Bill glides
softly in, lookin' as if he'd just seen Hell in a nightmare, the
manager wishes him good-mornin' an' asks him if he hadn't slep' well
last night.  'Fact is, mister,' said Bill, 'I've only a hazy
remembrance of 'ow I got to bed at all, an' it certainly wasn't till
close on four this mornin' in any case.  That gentleman-friend o'
mine an' me had two other gents to dinner at our lodgin's--I dessay
you remember we took eight bottles o' Scotch away from here with
us?--an' I must have had the devil's own luck at cards, for although
I seemed to get whacked every time as I went the bundle, jiggered if
I didn't wake up this mornin' with close on twelve quid in my kick--a
state o' things that whistles aloud for a bottle o' the best.  Give
us yer wine list, an' set out one tumbler for yerself.'  But the
manager, though producin' the wine list, says he makes it a rule
never to drink so early; besides he's jest had one; also it's the
brewery traveller's day for comin' down, an' that'll mean another.
So Bill Willis, with that glorious feelin' of affluence that comes
from a well-lined kick--when one feels matey with all the world, an'
seriously considers why he don't write to the brewery an' ask for
special terms for a wholesale order--sings a bottle o' something
extra sec at fourteen-an'-a-tanner, an' takes it from a half-pint
tumbler.  'Drink 'earty, boy!' he says to himself aloud as he fills
his second glass, an'--well, just as he said the words, in rushes Tom
Reeder!"

"Just in time, eh?"

"No, a wee bit late.  Tom's awfully hot-under-the-collar about
something or other, for he no sooner sets eyes on Bill, than he
bellers out, 'Gawdstroth, Bill, I've run half over Brighton to find
yer!'  'Well, you should have took a fly,' says Vi'lets, bold with
the booze; 'but what's the matter?'  'Matter enough!' shouts Tom,
'when you went to that ruddy wardrobe this mornin' you put on _my_
trahsers!"

It may not have been a very convincing _argumentum ad judicium_ (as
they said at Weatherby's when a certain racing countess wanted to
register "Haste to the Wedding" as the name of a gelding) for one so
well posted to have purchased before the eyes of all men a shilling
card from a racecourse tipster, whose wardrobe would have precluded
his obtaining employment at delivering coals, but I stood by the
rails to listen to the engaging story of how he never failed to find
the winner, but that it was his fearful thirst which seemed to keep
him broke; how he should "be 'aving something very 'ot" for the last
race, cabled straight to him by Slod Toan, who was at present
schooling yearlings for President Roosevelt in the Phillypeanut
Islands, on to which he wanted us to get our money into action quick,
tear up our return briefs, and ride 'ome in an airship.  Up to now,
he continued, the Ring didn't even know that such an 'orse existed;
but owner, trainer, and jockey had tried it to give two stone to
Pretty Polly, and were surprised to find it even so much better than
_that_, that they had wired to Coutts's to reserve room in their new
premises for another scuttleful.  All that he asked us to do was to
get on before the Ring rumbled, and show his card to our friends
afterwards.

Oh yes, dear; to anticipate your inevitable inquiry, I "done it," as
my tipster would have said, but it did not finish in the first eight.
The horse that won was owned by the brother-in-law of the authorised
printer of the official racecard, was bedded in the jockey's
ambulance room on dried seaweed, patented and sold on commission by
the handicapper, and came up and ate loaf-sugar out of the hand of
the clerk-of-the-scales.  Nevertheless, no sooner had "All right!"
been called, than the preposterous horse-watcher was peacocking up
and down the course in front of the lawn, closely followed by an
all-night souse without shoes or socks and blackballed in perpetuity
at the Rowton Residences, but shouting, with well assumed enthusiasm,
"Brayvo!  He's bin an' done it agen.  Brayvo!"  If only the poor
thing had realised his possibilities, and taken a short, graduating
course in one of the advertisement-concocting colleges (as the clerk
of the course, who took half the profits on the tipster's cards as
the price of giving permission to sell them, observed, as he stood
beside me and checked the man's sales) what couldn't he have torn off
the public with some more refined thimble-game, such as a new sawdust
health-food, a heal-the-blind "institute," or a dud encyclopedia?

But I must on no account omit to tell you of an ingenuous incident
which followed the decision of the antepenultimate event--"A Handicap
Hurdle Plate of 30 sovs. (to quote the card), for the produce of
mares that have never thrown a winner under any rules; gentlemen
riders, Members of the Postman's Knock Hunt who have touched twice
over one race to carry 7 lb. extra; the winner to be sold for 40
sovs.  Two miles, over eight flights of hurdles.  Six subs."

This valuable prize had just been taken by a ten-to-one shot, ridden
most admirably by the acquitted co-respondent of the noble horseman
who had bunkered the favourite down the wrong course, and we all
filed round to the back of the stand to see the winner bought in.  It
was about the only thing there was to do for ten minutes or so,
wherefore all but the tactiturn, the tired, and the tight-booted
trapesed round to the rostrum with a Cleopatra-going-to-meet-Antony
hopefulness.  Round and round a small railed-in grass plot, a stable
lad paced a still panting mare, whose sides were pinked by the spur,
and whose knees were so far ahead of her toes, that when she stood
still she looked as though she were getting ready to make a jump.
There would surely be a vitriolic battle-royal to possess her, and,
anticipating much spirited bidding, and being anxious not to begin
till all were assembled, the rural auctioneer stood in his pulpit
rubbing his hands together like the handkerchiefless person who eats
prawns in a race-train, and grinning as if he had suddenly contracted
gas on the brain.  Nor was he disappointed.  Opposed by a venal bunch
of leather-legginged get-rich-quick's, Bronzewing's owner had to go
to sixty-five guineas to retain her; and then, for a moment, we
looked like languishing again, for even the excitement attaching to
the attempted dispersal of a sensational stud of one soon dies down.
"But don't go away, please," cried the auctioneer, to our intense
relief, "I've one here that also ran.  Williams, bring in Little
Breeches."

And Williams did.  Little Breeches, a nine-year-old gelding, standing
about 17.2, came into the ring sideways like a one-eyed ghost
reluctantly winging its way to heaven.  Little Breeches had been
given a pint and a half of the celebrated "Flying Hornet" preserving
whisky before going to the post, and had tried three times to hang
himself in the starting-gate; now that the first effects of the
powerful stimulant were working off, there remained only a splitting
headache, whose mission it was to beat it into him that he had been
played, and, still too doped to show resentment, he walked round and
round as though in a trance.

"Now, gentlemen," cried the auction person, "I claim your attention
to Little Breeches, by Gumsucker out of Sewing Girl, by Gozo, by Wild
Oats.  A nice, handy animal, gentlemen, and one that is sure to pick
up a perfect roll of money this winter.  He's in the Sluggard's Plate
at Sandown Park next Tuesday at a nice weight, and only needs keying
up to concert pitch; now what may I say for him?"

But answer there came none.

"Come, gentlemen, come," rated the auctioneer, in a tone of
astonished reproach, "it only wants one of you to give me a start;
may I put him in at five guineas?  Walk him round again, Williams.  A
great, slashing colt like this--he was fairly on terms with the
winner at the last hurdle--and five guineas only bid!  Five--five in
two places--six, thank you, sir.  Six guineas only for Little
Breeches!  About a tenth of what he'd fetch to pull an omnibus!
Seven, seven--against you, sir, at seven--eight.  And eight I'm only
offered; have you all done at--nine, thank you, nine; may I make it
ten for you, sir?  Ten--going at ten----"

But even as the auctioneer hung upon his own words there came running
from the inner recesses of the refreshment room a burly, fatherly man
of fifty, who had the hansom-cab industry stamped indelibly all over
him.  He seemed amazed to find that the sale had progressed so far,
while he had been painting the future of cabbing in rosy colours and
bottled stout, and he pushed and elbowed his way through the throng
as though eager to retrieve lost opportunities.  Ducking beneath the
railings and entering the sale-ring, he stooped and ran his critical
right-hand fingers up and down the forelegs of Little Breeches.

"What's this one, mister?" he asked the auctioneer.

"Little Breeches, sir, by Gumsucker out of Sewing Girl," replied the
alert salesman, and added, "and it is against you at ten.  Now have
you all done at ten----"

"AND SIX!" advanced the representative of the Shoful Trust, with the
guileless air of one who hails from near to Nature's heart; and in
two ticks he was being roughly hustled towards the bleak high road by
a posse of the pantomimic pensioners done up in football pads, known
as the racecourse police.

But there are more takedowns at this game of racing than are
suspected by those who "do" their Derby dryfooted at their favourite
music-hall--even if one gives them in the takedown by the exhilarated
gentleman who is so pleased with himself at having worn dark blue and
yellow braces, that he enters the stalls with them dangling at his
heels for the racegoers in the pit to see and applaud.  Though these
stallites, after seeing St Amant spring from somewhere underneath the
orchestra, execute a few wild buck and wing steps in Barnard's Ring,
and then shoot bodily over the top of Mr Sherwood's cottage, may say
of the sporting press what David said in his haste of all concerned,
the dark thought and aching heart of desperation and despair are as
often seen in racing, as the black eye and splitting headache of
delirious joy.  For instance, estimate if you can, the weight of
anguish that is but faintly shadowed in the following letter, picked
up by me from the platform at Victoria:


"PEAVINE VILLA, NEW YEAR'S NIGHT.

"MY DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,--

Having cried over your sympathetic letter of yesterday until I have
started my nose a-bleeding, I have now hypothecated my wedding ring
and keeper, as you advised, and propose to stack my drapery and
return to dear old Saffron Walden to-morrow by the 10.25 from
Liverpool Street.  Heav'n knows I have loved James Henry (who has
again recently lost his voice in formally applying for a rise in his
salary) as ardently as any woman could; but the accursed Yellow Card
has come between us.  How little did I dream when, nine months ago,
James Henry offered me his heart, his hand, and whatever was left in
the weekly envelope after sweetening Topping and Spindler; and I
promised that even if he could not make me completely happy no other
should ever try to do so; that he entertained no thought of forsaking
the double-your-stake-but-stick-to-your-martingale system!

"For many months past James Henry, whose views on the true methods of
banishing poverty lend themselves felicitously to the purposes of the
vigilant humorist, has been strenuously endeavouring to choke a firm
at Flushing (postage 2½d.), and take it away from them.  Meantime the
rent has fallen two quarters in arrear, and our butcher has had the
immortal rind to stop supplies entirely.  The wretched grocer has
followed suit, and--from the quires of circulars telling how an
eighty-shilling income should carry a £200 bill-of-sale, which are
dropped into our letter-box--has mentioned the matter more than once
across his counter.  The climax came on Tuesday evening, when, during
Henry's absence, the landlord called.  He had a bunch of bananas, a
bottle of whisky, and six mince pies in a paper bag; and, saying he
would rather meet me than a mowing machine any day, he chased me
thirty-three times round the sitting-room sofa, and nearly forgot
that he was a gentleman.  I judged it better, however, to tell James
Henry that Mr Groundrent's demeanour was extremely frigid and
bitterly threatening; for no wreck of matrimony can destroy its high
ideals or take from her, who was judicious while it lasted, the gain
to her own soul of unselfishly endeavouring to preserve peace at any
sacrifice; whereupon James Henry wrote as follows:

"'Look here, Groundrent, dear old soul; it galls me like sin to have
to hand you the ice-bowl once again, but all my stocks are
falling--Bath Tramways, Allsopp's Ordinary, Cotton Spinners'
Deferred, and Schweppe's Pref.--and I can't even book a date till one
of them goes up.  Knowing, however, that you occasionally make out a
little bit of paper when you hear of any goods of an extra-superior
quality, I want you to keep your mouth shut and absorb the following
right straight into your system: You must have a pony each way
to-morrow, Broiled Bird in the Hardware Plate, and when it has
rollicked home, just pay yourself the two quarters' rent due, and act
honourably by dropping a little cheque for half of the diff.
remaining into any pillar-box, addressed to--Yours and so forth.'

"The occasional charwoman's little boy took the letter round, and was
unreflectingly detained in the hall--I say unreflectingly for the
reason that the youth was sucking a heavy line in paregoric lozenges
at the time--while Mr Groundrent penned the following reply:--

"'Sir, you omit, intentionally, or otherwise, the Turf alias of the
bug-eyed slanderer who averred that I occasionally pricked the
garter; but I respect your confidence, and even beg to slip you a
bigger cert than changing a shilling for a blind man.  I want you to
take the cotton batting out of your ears and let the good thing soak
right in--Bum Bailiff for the Man in Possession Stakes, first thing
in the morning.  Act honourably, as he has imperative orders to nail
anything to the floor if he catches you trying to shift it--Yours and
all, N. G.'

"Broiled Bird did not, I regret to say, connect; but Mr Groundrent's
nominee arrived before we were up.  He is at this moment gridironing
a kipper at the kitchen fire and reading aloud to our small servant
the more mirth provoking paragraphs from the "They say" column of
_Stubbs's Mercantile Gazette_.  Please have the spare bed well aired.
I can walk up from the station, and leave my trunk in the cloakroom
till later, since you say that old Snowdrop is nearly due to foal.
Since Louisa took it to Southend it only fastens with a hairpin, but
lord knows there's nothing in it to shock a married railway man.  So
no more, with love and kisses,

HENRIETTA."


And here must I break off, for the first bell has gone, and to-night
dinner is to be followed by that fine old country-house frolic which
has been the beginning of so many flourishing society
divorces--snapdragon with the lights out.

  Thine,
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE IX

EATON SQUARE, _Tuesday, February_ 15_th._

MY DEAR PATRICIA,--

How extremely dead are the pretty customs of St Valentine's Day!
Time was when the bright, lively girl who for two or three seasons
had been, as it were, a rag on every bush, used to look forward to
the 14th of February to "get the office" to become the whole garment
to some deserving young bachelor who had been reared with care.  For
such, St Valentine was a sort of last chance for late chickens, as
the incubator persons say; but youths do not seem to take seriously
to matrimony now, and if by chance one proposes to a girl in a
conservatory or on the stairs, he calls round in the morning to
apologise.  And valentines--the earliest of which, dear, a red brick
engraved with "Only one girl in the world for me," in cuneiform
characters, which was handed by King David, the first royal
co-respondent, through the transom in Uriah's roof, you still may see
in the British Museum--are quite things of the past.  Lovesick swains
do not give, but expect to receive, valentines in these days; and
only yesterday Lady Mabel Smoothleigh was telling me how her latest
"boy" had importuned her to "send me something you have kissed."  But
Mabel acted rather meanly, I think, in sending him her great athletic
husband, a person of biceps rather than a beau, and one who while
paying Mabel little attention himself is most handy at rushing up and
sticking his knee in the pit of a weakling's stomach, if he catches a
weakling even looking at Mabel on the rare occasions when he takes
her out.  I have quite frequently noticed that these burly, impetuous
bridegrooms who, before marriage, exact the most definite promises
that ducksie will never, never leave their sides--not even to go to
the bathroom by herself--are the first to tire of propinquity and to
yearn to get back to the mud of the football field on Saturday to see
the Kensal Green Hotspurs lay out the Brompton Cemetery Uniteds.  The
unfortunate "best boy" is dreadfully damaged, I fear, and principally
through his not putting himself, as the old-fashioned Methodists used
to say, "in a suitable attitude to receive the blessing," but really
these light-weight Josephs should make fuller inquiries.

Yesterday, let me tell you, I came perilously near falling into a new
and insensate hobby: to-day I am happily again as free and unfettered
as the yellow heathen who, getting no answer to his latest prayer,
pitches his Joss out into the back yard and dances a wild fandango on
its breast.  Yesterday I hung for awhile over the yawning chasm in
which are immured "the Fancy": to-day I resume my former belief that
the toy dog, with its asthma and its silk coat, and its velvet pad
and its chronic snuffles, amounts to a public calamity.  Write down
in wine upon a rose-leaf scroll, as old Omar says, that I have had a
very close shave of Caniolatry, but have got out.

I had strolled round to Grosvenor Place to carry a message from Féo
to the widowed Lady Steyning, whose only daughter is so vitiated by
having always been given her own way that she positively breeds
Blenheim spaniels in the cream-and-gold drawing room which her
anguished mother had specially modelled on that of the Viscountess
Hayashi, in "the Gardens," lower down.  But Io Venusta Falconrouge
Mayleigh--a rather ancient and honourable name to be giving a
pug-nosed tyke a carbolic bath with--simply exists for her dogs; she
reads and writes and talks and dreams of nothing else--indeed she
told me in confidence she veritably believed that the fascinating
animal who tempted Eve was a fabled but unattainable ideal "cross"
between the Schipperke and the Redwillow Airedale.  Such a contention
would surely have entangled even Solomon himself--though, to be sure,
the scriptural embodiment of wisdom who admitted that "the way of a
man with a maid" had him beaten out of his boots would not take much
losing nowadays.  I felt dreadfully sorry for poor Lady Steyning,
however, when the last little animal to receive its ablutions
precipitated the complete outfit--basin, unguents, brushes,
everything--partly over her lovely new oyster-blue moire and
liberally upon the equally beautiful green Wilton pile carpet, for
her nerves are not strong and she suffers from a rheumatic affection
of the eyes which constant weeping only aggravates.

But maternal tears have no effect upon Io; she has long accustomed
herself to criticise her hysterical mother with considerable
precision and an utter absence of sympathy; so, with a brusque but
not unkindly "There, there, chop out the twaddle and turn off the
tears and Vi and I may come back from the Dog Show in time to take
lunch with you," she dragged me downstairs, bundled me into a hansom,
and almost before I had realised it we were bowling along the
newly-made roads inside Buckingham Gate and traversing a perfect
forest of labourers, all swinging their picks and shovels and other
armorial bearings of the fine old Brassey family.

"I confess that her eyes give her some trouble," remarked IO, as she
drew her suede gloves on in the cab, "but she's a jolly sight too
fond of calling her soul her own.  The amount of 'footle,' as Mr
Crosland calls it, that my brother Bill and I put up with from her
exceeds human belief.  _I_ invariably talk back at her, but Bill,
male-like, is more compassionate: he usually says nothing, taps the
butler for a tenner---that's the best of paying servants regularly:
you can always touch them for a bit if you run short--and then comes
back in three days to see how the land lies.  He'd have gone to
Australia years ago, but for transportation being abolished and an
idiotic system called 'passage-money' substituted.  Aha! here's
Piccadilly Circus; what do you say to a sherry and curacoa at the
Cri.; north of this point all alcohol is outside the pale of
Christian toleration?"

She has quite lost the girlishness that took Girton by storm, dear,
and the charmingly confident way in which she entered the wine bar,
and, sitting down at a small table and summoning a waiter, cried
"Small elevens for two shareholders, and get a gait on you; we're
keeping a 'fresh' horse waiting," would have compelled your
admiration.  Nor was she one whit less at home at the Dog Show
itself.  In her long tweed coat, cut loose enough in the back to give
play to her gathered short skirt, and the high, tan, laced boots
which only the neat-footed can wear with absolute confidence, she
strutted up and down the sawdust aisles, disinterestedly accepting a
saddle-soap or hound-glove catalogue here and criticising a "nicked"
or "trimmed" ear there, or declaring to some sister enthusiast that
fish-biscuit manufacturers were every bit as mendacious as
restaurateurs--stick to them for a month or two, and you are well
done; after that you must hunt up somebody new who has got a name to
make.  I felt such an unqualified novice in dog matters that I could
have screamed out of sheer exasperation; although I feel sure that I
seemed quite deeply "in it" to Io by the hearty way she laughed when
I told her how "we"--(it was an old, old story of Mr Contango's which
I fortunately remembered)--won the Waterloo Cup with a dog who was
trained exclusively on '48 brandy, and to whose tail a firework was
adroitly attached at the psychological instant of the starting-gate
going up.

We returned to Grosvenor Place to find Lady Steyning still tearful
and distinctly not making the most of the placid middle age which
should be her welcome portion.  "I do wish you had been here an hour
ago, Io, instead of dallying with your everlasting dogs," she
bleated, "Sir David Fenner, from Harley Street, has been and he
associates my _iritis_ with the gouty diathesis--_arthritic iritis_,
I think he called it.  And I grieve to tell you--" (here the
inevitable weeping started)--"he made no secret of the
pro-bab-b-b-bility--" (here she broke down piteously)--"of my
becoming stone b-b-blind before very long!"

For a moment Io was manifestly embarrassed.  She did not weep, but
strolling mechanically to the piano, upon the music rack of which
stood an autographed first copy of _Get Your Hair Cut_, she struck a
few treble chords to regain her composure.  Then, turning, she went
and laid her right hand kindly on her mother's shoulder.

"Never mind, old sportie," she said, "you have always hated my
'everlasting' dogs; now, perhaps, you will discover the utility of
them.  With 'Spotty,' or 'Dearie,' or 'Flossie' on the end of a bit
of string, and a stick to tap the pavements with, you can still
toddle round Belgravia for many years to come!"

Suiting the action to the suggestion, Io closed her eyes and,
shuffling across the room, cried in an assumed and whining voice,
"Buy a box o' lights, sir, pity the poor blind, the poor blind!"  For
some reason or other, Lady Steyning burst into tears and rushed from
the room: probably, as Io hazarded, "That blessed brother of mine has
been bothering her again: he's _constantly_ upsetting her."

I think that if I were Io I should take a firmer hand with a brother
than she does.  For a younger child he enjoys too many
privileges--and naturally abuses them.  Lady Steyning (whom he
greatly shocked one night at the Opera by shouting out to Edouard de
Reszke, during his greatest scene in _Faust_, "Dy'e mind singing a
bit slower, old man; my French is a bit rusty and I'm blowed if I can
follow you!") thinks, for instance, that by encouraging him to go to
all the best theatres and recitals, his better nature may eventually
be appealed to and his baser propensities subdued.  To this end she
has given him _carte blanche_ to ring up on the telephone her
box-office agents in Bond Street, and to have put down to her account
whatever seats he needs.  He may be slowly assimilating music--and Io
says she will back him to make more noise at a music-hall bar than
Handel and Mozart and Rossini rolled together--but it is scarcely in
accordance with old-fashioned views of propriety that a firm of
high-standing in the musical world should have to render such a bill
as the following to--

  THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE COUNTESS OF STEYNING.

  _In account with_ ---- and ----

  157A Old Bond Street, W.

  _To_

  Feb. 10th.  1 Stage Box.  Red Barn Varieties, Kilburn
                 (Grand "Corder" Night) . . . . . . . . . £2  2  0

   "   11th.  10 Resvd. Fauteuils.  Peckham Parthenon
                 (Testimonial to "Pills," head waiter)  .  3 15  0

   "   12th.  4 Dress Circles.  Tabnab's Tottenham
                 Empire (First night of "Toffy's Trotter, or
                 Tannhauser in Ten Minutes")  . . . . . .  0  8  0

  Feb. 13th.  2 Sofa Stalls.  Poplar Pavilion (Wrestling
                 Matinee, Acton Jim _versus_ Gunnersbury
                 Joe) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  0 15  0

   "   14th.  Grande Loge.  Bow Tivoli (Compy. Benft.,
                 Widow and Childn. of Fireman Gaspipe)  .  3  3  0

   "   15th.  2 Standing Rooms.  Club Row Parthenon,
                 Brick Lane, E.  ("Pearly" King's Select
                 Dog Fight) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4  0  0
                                                          --------
                                                         £14  3  0

And it is made all the more mortifying by the unctuous leer of the
shopman in Bond Street, who, when poor Lady Steyning (not having
perused the account) calls in to change a book or get a new piece of
music, remarks:

"Might we ask yer leddyship to favour us with yer leddyship's orders
for theatre tickets a little earlier, if possible?  We very nearly
missed the four dress circ's for 'Toffy's Trotter' last Wen's'dy
through Tabnab's Empire not bein' on the telephone."

Pray what _do_ you think that preposterous girl, Euphemia Hulcot, has
just done?  Being still under the impression that the "rich military
blood of Uncle Joseph" flows in her veins, she has procured an
appointment as a field-nurse in this Russo-Japanese unpleasantness,
positively!  In truth, Uncle Joseph's military record was so
conspicuously unbloody that, like Dod Grile's hero, his friends
sought for him the Humane Society's leather medal for saving life;
nor did he lose his leg at Inkerman, but in the Marylebone Road while
spending the evening at the house of a man who was not at home
himself, though his wife was.  Uncle's involuntary host came home
quite unexpectedly, however, and, thinking the place seemed too
crowded, picked up the blunderbuss with which his ancestor fought (on
both sides, by the way) at Naseby, and put about twelve ounces of
buckshot, some old garden nails, and various other marine stores into
Uncle Joseph's left leg just as Uncle Joseph was doing
Follow-the-man-from-Cook's out of the window--"a Joseph never was a
stayer!" as Mrs Potiphar remarked when she cast the coat-tail into
the rag-bag.  Six of the smartest surgeons in all England received
Euphemia's kinsman at St Mary's Hospital, and, an hour later, when he
recovered consciousness, they told him not to worry over his lost
limb, but to consider it as a contribution to his mashing record.

To her fugitive knowledge of surgery, gathered from the four corners
of _Hahnemann Undone, or How I Spiked Homeopathy's Battery_, she has
added a course of campaign training, chiefly consisting of sleeping
on a seaweed palliasse out in the bicycle shed, and now she is
literally bursting to ring the bell on the Red Cross League.  Nothing
but the Rembrandtesque hue of her tresses secured her the official
permit to join the fighting line.  Said the extremely exalted Jap
person who gave it, "Every time I look at that ginger nut of yours,
puss, I think of a little bit of stuff that I left behind in
Nagasaki, and for her sweet sake alone I will slip you the trysting
place of the 10th Osaka Mounted Assassins.  Hand this to their
Colonel"--here he presented her with a Chinatown washing bill--"and
he will give you the put-and-call of the field coffee-stall, such as
it is.  Fare you well!"

Please the pigs and she's not pinched, Euphemia will leave Western
barbarians and the Albert Docks on Wednesday next, wearing a loose
shirtette of wax-red pongee girded to the ear-lobe with whalebone,
and confined at the waist by a gold and matrix buckle.  A plain gold
necklet with topaz collets and a lucky pig charm, Harris tweed
knickerbockers held in place by orange silk galluses, and pegamoid
putties with hand-painted chrysanthemums, will complete the toilette.
She will carry a somewhat darker blouse for evening wear, and cricket
shoes, in the full expectation of having to stand in some slippery
places before she gets back; also a silver whist-register and marking
pencil, a "Little Wonder" printing-press for marking her linen,
combination purse and card-case, glove-fastener, and a small
wrist-bag containing loose change for 'bus fares, etc.  Thus equipped
she will travel with every confidence, and is not a bit afraid of
falling in with Cossacks since she is quite an adept at climbing a
telegraph pole.  As her aged Uncle Joseph says, she will be more in
touch with life than he was at eighteen, when he swarmed up the
lightning rod at the Girls' High School and then found the window
fastened.

On Tuesday evening, Féo having promptly gone out to play Bridge, on
being told by our housekeeper that the cellar needed re-coaling--and
as it is only when she revokes that she wins, her winning is never in
doubt--I put into practice the theory of that one of the saints who
said that, if people only knew it, there were bushels of fun to be
got out of being good, by "observing" Lent at the delightful Shrove
Tuesday Ball at Covent Garden; and the only living being that knows
how I returned at daybreak on Ash Wednesday is the obliging market
porter who drove my car home, my chauffeur having been laid out
during a misunderstanding with the coachman of the brougham
immediately in his rear concerning the smell of his escaping petrol.
Our chauffeur, I have heard Mr Contango say, entertains the idea that
he can "go a bit with his fly-dusters," in which case the man from
the brougham must have been a veritable specialist, for our
white-mackintoshed servitor went out like an egg-shell caught in a
whirlwind.  Even when the police recovered all that was left of him,
there was no place to lay it out, so many dancing couples from the
country having turned up quite unexpectedly, that the limited
accommodation of the Bijou Temperance Hotel was dreadfully
over-taxed--indeed, the last Earl and Countess to arrive, yawning
like craters, had, I am told, to put up with the boot cupboard on the
lower landing.

This particular Ball was promoted, I imagine, in a purely devotional
spirit, Messrs Rendle and Forsyth believing, with some accuracy, that
men fast more willingly and spontaneously after an all-night tag;
though it differs, I am also informed, from the dramatic annuals of
other days in that the gentlemen who come chiefly to fight are never
allowed to get in the way of the dancers.  Save that, in the
grand-circle, Lord Staffa of Iona (who is said to be so deeply
interested in the dramatic career of Miss Elfie Delorme, of Daly's,
and who was giving supper to a small party) dealt out a black eye to
the Viscount Tynwald, one of his guests, for facetiously passing the
Chateau Lafitte to a lady who had only asked for the vinegar; and
that, in the corridor, two gentlemen from the Stock Exchange had a
lightning mix-up on one remarking on being introduced to the other's
lady, that formalities were a bit superfluous seeing that he had been
fairly rancid on the bird himself some seven years ago; one might
have been in almost any Belgravian drawing-room.

Oh yes! there was one other gentleman who drew a Jonah ticket.  For
the moment I forget his name, but it was in all the papers some few
months ago, when he staggered humanity by marrying his mother's maid
instead of strangling her; and on Tuesday night he suddenly
recognised her, though dominoed and masked, by the exceptional colour
of her silk hose when she fell down during the Lancers.  Of course,
she was under the escort of her husband's oldest and dearest college
chum (just as, in lower circles and the popular ballad, it is always
that fun-loving economist "the lodger"); and, in order to plaster the
walls of their private box on the second tier with the brains of the
guilty pair, the wretched youth borrowed a hatchet from a fireman and
ascended the stairs.  He hammered on the box door; but, even as it
flew open, his courage failed him, and murmuring, "No, no, I still
love her too much to kill her," would have retired, axe and all, but
for the numerous cohort of disappointed dancers that had followed for
the express purpose of seeing that he did not do so.  No sooner
therefore did the guilty woman, grasping the situation, ask the crowd
what it meant by this intrusion, since the cavalier at her side was
the kindest friend she knew, and a real good old thing while he
lasted, than an athletic young stranger who had been handling iron
bridges on the Upper Nile, stepped out and gave hubby one on the
submaxillary gland and two on the bugle before he could exclaim,
"Ooch!" and they took him away, I am told, on a hooded stretcher.

As to the dresses, dear, many of them were ravishing enough to have
restored a madman to his senses!  One of the most daring was,
perhaps, "Appendicitis," worn by a shapely blonde girl attired in a
mere ham-frill of aseptic nun's-veiling, caught up at the side by a
scalpel and a bistoury, crossed; completeness being secured by a
large grape-seed carried between the fair wearer's languourous red
lips.  She was awarded by acclamation a huge kettle, and was told to
take it home and treasure it as it would be her last whisper in
_that_ show.  Many men turned round to look a second time at "Skip
the Gutter," an ordinary champagne muslin walking-dress, the skirt of
which was carried knee high to display cochineal silk socks and opera
sandals.  I wish I had been able to ascertain the name of the builder
of this striking creation, but before I could get through the crowd,
the fair wearer had disappeared--slipped out to see if the weather
seemed likely to clear up, the policeman at the door said.  A
beautiful St John's Wood widow, who since her gallant young husband's
death at the front, has gone every night to some function or other,
being too nervous to sleep alone and having not a friend on earth
except the man who happens to be with her, looked perfectly
distracting in whipped cream crêpe de chine, with pink Banksia roses
and raspberry underpinning--an exceedingly rococo combination.

Much more I might have had to tell you had I not been most
effectually held up on the staircase by the Earl of Thirstington, who
had temporarily renounced everything but whisky-and-seltzer, and who,
not penetrating my disguise, would certainly have hugged me where I
stood had I not addressed him sternly by his family title and
threatened him with all sorts of dire penalties if he did not permit
me instantly to pass.  Steadied somewhat by the sound of his own
name, he implored me to unmask, but finding me inflexible, he assured
me that since mating unhappily in order to please his people, about
two years ago, he had continually prayed that Death might overtake
him, in which earnest petition his inapposite spouse had frequently
joined.  He had now happened to hear by the merest accident that
divorces were practically free in a place called Oklahoma, and if I
would only accompany him to some lonely island where we could live
Crusoe fashion until he got his decree and Southern Pacific's went
above 63 again, he would be a white man and make me his Countess!
Only think of it, Patricia!  And it was only in October last that we
all went down to his private chapel at Drouth Park to the unveiling
of the stained glass window which he erected to the memory of his
wife who, in the previous August, died of grief at realising that he
did not kiss her as ardently as formerly!

It was a very realistic bit of acting that I put in then, Kid!
Giving him my left glove, and permitting him to kiss the tips of my
fingers only, I told him he might inscribe his tablets with the name
of "Elsie" and ring up 55793, Holborn, some time when he had a
lighter load on.  Fitly humbled by this admonition, he replied that
in about ten hours he should ask me to join him at lunch at the
Imperial, and if from any cause I could not or would not turn up, I
should be performing a distinct service to his family by calling at
Vine Street, and requesting the police to have the fountain basins in
Trafalgar Square dragged.

But, like Cinderella, I must do a timely duck; besides, February is
all too short for long letters.

  Thine,
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE X

ROYAL YORK HOTEL, BRIGHTON, _March_ 11_th._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

Your little note, forwarded to me from Eaton Square, came to hand
yesterday, and just as soon as I have finished my breakfast I purpose
forwarding to you in commemoration of the birthday of which you
unselfishly remind me--(I would, by the way, cheerfully send you my
breakfast also, but that a delicious kedgeree and a perfect champagne
cup would be quite thrown away on a person whose changeless morning
meal for years has consisted of a stiff brandy-and-soda and a
splitting headache)--a beautiful little sapphire and diamond
spittoon, which I fortunately saw in a shop window in King's Road
yesterday.  My memory is less definite concerning the total of your
years, but considering you have had about four birthdays per annum
since you became acquainted with the fact that I possess real money
in my own right, you cannot be far short of sixty.

Careless of your highly probable comment that you are being
continually chevvied through life by utterly uninteresting
information, I may tell you, Patricia, that a week ago I had serious
thoughts of going in for athletics--fencing, punting, rowing, and
especially wrestling.  Bridge is all very well in its way, motoring
is not so insufferably rotten, and golf, played to sacred music,
satisfies the elderly, but it is the feat of honest labour that gives
a girl the elasticity, the baudelarian swing of the hips, and the
sweet self-confidence that she so much desires.  And I had been a
long-distance worshipper of athletes time enough to look upon them
all as Olympian gods until my muscular chum Dot Warnford--why is it
that the girl who is physically capable of throttling a Lothario with
a "full-nelson," or throwing a Tarquin over her head with a
"flying-mare," invariably bears a name like "Dot"?--came down last
week-end.  As a matter of fact I wired for her, purely and simply
that she, who can infuse poetry into white canvas gymnastic shoes, or
swing Indian clubs till the other girls in her environment look like
a set of cripples, might feast her eyes as I have daily done upon
"Socrates Aristides' Phalanx of Undefeated Graeco-Roman Champions,"
now giving performances on the Pier.  You have surely heard of
Socrates Aristides at the London variety theatres: he is
alternatively called The Aggravating Athenian?  He is a truly
splendid fellow, with just such a torso as they used to depict in the
advertisements of Argosy braces--so widely dissimilar to that of the
fashionable young man of to-day whose only exercise is betting on the
tape.  Aristides is, so to speak, the basic and fundamental principle
of the whole show, the eight magnificent oysters adhering to the rock
being the Intimidating Israelite, the Appalling Abyssinian, the
Hideous Hessian, the Paralysing Parthian, the Dreadful Dalmatian, the
Frightful Finn, the Horrible Hebrew, and the Terror of Tullamore.  To
the voice of Aristides I had listened enthralled, on many successive
afternoons, as from the stage he offered to back any member of his
troupe to inflict upon any comer more "falls" in one hour than the
busiest woman in the Peerage would willingly acknowledge in a
lifetime.  Frequently some fatuous British amateur (for to our
national shame no insular professors appear to be in the business at
all) would essay a bout, whereat the noble Greek would call
forward--say the Horrible Hebrew, who, having hitched up his worsted
tubulars so that nothing might occur to mar the complete enjoyment of
the programme, would proceed to put an armlock upon the stranger that
would cause him to cry peccavi in quite a loud tone of voice.

One vigorous, conclusive blow from Dot Warnford has completely
shattered the rose jar!  To some stomachs the bare and brutal truth
is food, and tonic, and medicament, but my own digestive apparatus
positively refuses to form chyle from crude or even unadroitly
disguised veracities.  The finest wine-cellar in all Mayfair may be
raised upon concrete, bricked to stand for ever, and majestic in its
very mustiness; but to my mind it passes swiftly away--crumbles into
atomless nothingness--from the instant that an impoverished tenant
begins to keep coals in it; in other words, Dot had not only seen the
"Phalanx of Undefeated Graeco-Roman Champions" several times
previously, but knew intimately each one of them, or, as she put it,
had "met them on the mat."  And thus did she proceed to strip them:

The Intimidating Israelite, said she, won his title with a pack of
cards while keeping a Leytonstone livery-stable tidy at eighteen bits
per week; and the Appalling Abyssinian came to this country in charge
of a performing elephant, but so outdid the pachyderm in sea-sickness
all the way that he was thrown overboard in Gravesend Reach by the
coarse, but facetious, sea-captain, who dearly loved a joke and
thought the place not inappropriate.  The Hideous Hessian came from
Shepherd's Bush; it was a noted kind of grease-paint to be bought in
Garrick Street, Covent Garden, that gave to him the pale sea-green
complexion of a turtle's stomach.  The Paralysing Parthian and the
Dreadful Dalmatian never appeared together on the same
platform--indeed the parts were played by one and the same man on
alternate nights in knee-pads of a different colour.  Far from his
being either "dreadful" or "paralysing," his late chums, at the
Westbourne Park Loco Sheds (G. W. Ry.), where he had been an esteemed
foreman engine-wiper, spoke of him as being "as quiet a bloke as ever
grafted in a boiler works."  The Frightful Finn was better known at
Barnet Fair as "Dirty Mickey" who used to do a catch-as-catch-can
with a bear in a boxing booth until, becoming unduly intoxicated one
night, he so ragged the bear that it shouted, "Aisy, Mick, ye
something fool!" and eventually drew a knife from its hind leg on
him; an unfortunate affair which consummately ruined the show.  The
Horrible Hebrew, who originally sold patent medicines from a
waggonette at market street-corners, had had the bad luck, one busy
night, to get an entire batch of bile beans contaminated by coming in
contact with his naphtha lamps, thereby ruining for ever his chances
of succeeding in the medical profession; while the Terror of
Tullamore nobody, either here or in Ireland, seemed to know anything
about.  Dot had herself been so curious to learn something of the
Terror's doubtless lurid past that she had addressed a personal note
of interrogation to the Chief Constable of Leinster.  This polite
official, however, after making the most exhaustive and exhausting
inquiries, replied that the only "terror" that had been known in
Tullamore during the last half century, was a certain old lady who
was in receipt of eight shillings a week from a firm of
widows'-pension teamen in London, and who, immediately on receipt of
postal order every Friday, expended the whole of the money in bottled
porter, and then, after removing most of her clothing, proceeded to
delight the populace by dancing in the streets, varying the
performance occasionally by standing on her head.  Why is it, I
wonder, that elderly ladies invariably dance when under the influence
of alcohol?

Thus passes my infatuation of yesterday, and with the departure of
the athletic Dot, with her dumb-bells and developers and her
efficacious substitute for heavy bedclothes, the very mention of
which has often caused a sudden suffusion of blood to the temples of
a modest listener of the adverse sex--"You don't catch me in bed,"
says she, "without a _Sportsman_ between the blankets!"; only
meaning, of course, that the journal of that name, being printed on
particularly good paper, gives warmth without weight--I shall subside
to my former feminality, contemptuous neither of mice nor men.

It always amuses me to recall your bygone but well-remembered remark,
that life in Brighton consisted principally in changing clothes and
inquiring for letters, for it never fails to set me wondering
whether, at the time of your last visit to the Sussex shore, you were
too young to be ardent--an overgrown, scraggy schoolgirl to be kept
out of mischief by close surveillance--or old enough to be jaded--a
mere gawky and uninteresting cipher in that desert of humanity, the
big hotel.  In all probability, however, you would have sound
economical motives for visiting Brighton during June or July, when
the leaders of the aristocracy in the King's Road are the second
bride of the great cereal breakfast-food, or the mamma and daughters
of the sixpenny summer-drink crystals, "pure, wholesome, and
possessing the pleasant aroma and refreshing acidity of the fresh-cut
lemon?"  It makes all the difference.

As I close these sentences the woman whose ripe beauty and rich
millinery have been the talk of Brighton for a month past, is weeping
herself hideous across two lawn pillows and behind drawn blinds in
the costliest mansion in Hove, while the youth who was harpooned
three weeks ago, and who resigned himself to her absolute despotism
until yesterday, is on his way to Ghargaroo in the Unfriendly
Islands.  The conquest of young Mr Bruton Berkeley by Mrs Lottsmore
Barres, the junobusted relict of the late Colonel B. Gopher Barres,
who founded the famous American trust for manufacturing baking-powder
from the eggs of the sea-urchin and who met his death through getting
his feet wet while playing the hose on his stocks, had startled even
Brighton (for whose benefit matrimony is locally supposed to have
been exclusively invented) by its suddenness.  For Mr Berkeley had
seemed (and probably was) quite a shy and blameless youth, satisfying
neither the eye nor the judgment, and remarkable only for the uniform
vapidity of his expressions.  Meeting Mrs Barres, whose evening lace
stockings and patent-leather Richelieu shoes are a byword down here,
at a dance-supper at the Dome, however, the boy formed the instant
opinion that she fairly out-classed all other representatives of her
sex, and on telling her as much, was invited to call upon her on the
following afternoon.  It was whilst paying this pleasant call that he
got what was coming to him.

It was indeed within five minutes of his arrival, while his charming
hostess, dressed to within an inch of her life, had him alone in the
Louis-the-Something drawing-room, telling him of her unhappy married
life with the late Colonel, and just how the Supreme Court gave her a
decree on her substantiating her complaint that the respondent
refused to divide his popcorn fairly that, without any warning, her
nose began to bleed quite freely.  Ever resourceful and ready for
emergencies, Mr Berkeley rushed to the door, turned and took the key,
and promptly rammed it down Mrs Lottsmore Barres's well-covered back,
doubtless noticing as he did so that she would act wisely in future
in renouncing all such nourishing foodstuffs as sweet potatoes,
butter, cream, sugar, new bread, and chocolates.  At that moment
steps were heard in the corridor outside; some one tried the door,
and finding it locked, began to knock.  Upon realising the awfulness
of the position, and the further fact that she could not return the
key without disrobing in the presence of an acquaintance of only one
day's standing, Mrs Lottsmore Barres promptly fainted, and--well, in
true Lovelacian acknowledgment of the thoughtless way in which he had
compromised the lady, Mr Bruton Berkeley empowered the sixteen male
and female servants who at this juncture burst in the door to
announce his immediate and formal engagement to their mistress.  In
place of the prosaic handshake with which his arrival had been
greeted, Mr Berkeley departed with a warm and affectionate kiss upon
his lips and a large panel photograph by Sarony, measuring 17x36,
without the massive silver frame, beneath his arm.  It may have been
not recently taken, but it showed the upper two-thirds of Mrs
Lottsmore Barres in half-tone profile, laughing artlessly over her
right shoulder at an imaginary husband who was being taken to prison
for her dressmaker's bill, and was calling back to enjoin her not to
forget during the coming sixty days that she was still a married
woman.  In return, Mr Berkeley sent Mrs Barres a hurried tinograph of
himself taken on the beach, not as a permanent record but as a sort
of carry-over until the photographers in East Street could finish for
him a set of cabinets; which done, he set up the magnificent picture
of his fiancée on a gilt and plush easel in his hotel bedroom.

Alas! why does not some unseen power obliterate us all, just as we
have reached and sat for awhile on the topmost pinnacle of earthly
happiness?  What heartaches might be spared were we in the midst of
all our glory to be eternally debarred from drifting back into the
muddy pool of humdrum conventionality!  That night Mr Berkeley lay
gazing upon the limned presentment of his love by the light of the
expiring fire, precisely as did Wordsworth--or perhaps I should have
said Shelley--when he wrote, his languid eyes still fixed upon her
portrait:

  "Of herself but a mere reminder
    Till the shadows began to creep,
  Then, taking one 'tot' as a binder,
    I suddenly fell asleep."


Eight hours later, during the comparatively disagreeable moments of
returning consciousness which preface the superlatively disgusting
necessity for getting out of bed, Mr Berkeley noticed that his window
was wide open, that the lace curtains were floating and flapping like
pennants in the morning breeze.  He next observed that towering above
the quite ordinary disorder of a varnished pump on the washstand, a
shower of silver coins on the hearthrug, and a dress-coat in the
fender, there existed a more definite and significant disarrangement
of his chamber's ameublement.  Diamond pins and ruby rings and pearl
shirt-studs bestrewed the floor: money and jewellery were scattered
on all sides.  Here lay a bureau drawer, all ransacked and upturned;
there a jewel-case, wrenched and rummaged, but not robbed; the lock
of yonder wardrobe had been raped, the sartorial contents of the
wardrobe searched and flung about, but neither damaged nor depleted;
nothing did the scene suggest so vividly as the tousled track over
which an irascible woman had hunted in vain for a fugitive but
favourite hat-pin.

But stay--

From the golden easel the panel portrait of Hortensia Lottsmore
Barres had alone been stolen!  The survey of a single instant served
to show that there now adhered to the gilt ledge upon which the
cherished likeness had so lately stood nothing but a scrawled note,
written apparently with much haste, and the charcoal end of a burned
match.  Jumping out of bed and clutching the precious document, Mr
Bruton Berkeley read:


"SLUMBERING UNKNOWN,--

"This is a let-off for you, and no sanguinary error!  Much, however,
as I need fresh financial underpinning, I cannot 'ease' you with her
eyes watching me.  With one exception, you will find your props as
safe, if not as undisturbed, as if they had been spiked down: I have
half-inched nothing but the portrait of--MY MOTHER!  I had been told
she was in Heaven: I lament the lie, but hope, as the next best, that
she's still in Society--not that _I_ go out much; in the daytime,
anyway.  If I now ask you not to marry her, it is less on account of
caring whether you are lynched for bigamy, than that you don't
somehow connect with a dream I had of my next stepfather.

  "Yours for a true bill,
      "PYTHAG THE PORCH-CLIMBER."


Inasmuch as the burglar had left untouched quite five hundred pounds
worth of property, not including the two ham sandwiches which he had
tied beneath his boot soles to deaden the sound of his footsteps, and
which were fully identified by the barmaids from the railway station
later in the day, the genuineness of his letter was beyond reasonable
questioning; yet Mr Berkeley timidly but successfully shunned Mrs
Lottsmore Barres until the evening.  Then, with the rare daring that
is born of drink, he burst into her presence and inquired with all
the confidence possessed by one who feels that things are coming his
way, what she thought of the old Greek philosophers in general, and
of Plato and Pythagoras in particular?  Suspecting nothing, Mrs
Barres replied that she had always regarded Plato as a bit of a
hold-over, but as for dear old J. H. Pythag--how fateful was the
abbreviation!--"why, he should have been nothing less than a
Vanderbilt, 'specially for his brainy distinctions 'tween the soul
an' the body!"

_That_ was enough!  Like a true squire of dames, Mr Bruton Berkeley
held his peace at the time, but pulled his freight out of Brighton
with the coming of night.  He is now upon the high seas, and his
friends here are sanguine that he will fare well.  There is little
risk, after all, in consigning an easy-going, good-natured lad of
mettle, totally devoid of either solidity or ambition, to a horde of
friendly cannibals; whereas an older person of high morals and
credentials going out to such a place as Buenos Ayres to take up an
official position, would certainly be preceded by his reputation for
strict integrity and incorruptibility, and on that ground alone would
be instantly murdered on arrival.  As for Mrs Lottsmore Barres, her
wound will quickly heal.  Like the racing peer who could never set
eyes on the late Mr Weatherby without feeling an irresistible desire
to scratch something, the mere sight of an eligible bachelor steels
her for conquest.  She will array her form in new frocks and her soul
in new sentiments and, with a yellow dog for a mascotte, re-enter the
fray.  I do not know that I myself may not risk paying her a visit of
condolence this afternoon: man-hunting is not contagious, is it?

Almost the only drawback to being out of town at this season is that
one rather fails to grasp some of the allusions to "What the Little
Birds are Saying" in the only possible ladies' newspaper; so, dear,
though well aware that you cannot take up a pen without losing a lie,
may I ask you to furnish me with the diagrams to the following:--


OVERHEARD BY THE LITTLE BIRD

In Chesterfield Gardens--"That Lady Alberta would certainly do well
to swear off for a season and give it a much-needed rest."

At the same--"That her coronet only kept on her head by the timely
aid of her left ear at the christening of the new torpedo-destroyer
last Thursday."

At the same--"And that when it came to naming the vessel
_Polyhymnia_, she simply couldn't stick it."

On The Lees--"That the gallant and much-to-be-pitied Major acted
foolishly in going for the Rajah as he did."

At the same--"That all Folkstone has known about it for weeks, but
never expected anything half so rich as last Saturday's free,
_al-fresco_ entertainment."

At the same--"That the genial old soldier's sporting instincts came
out strongly even in his wrath when he kicked the whitey-brown,
half-clad co-respondent in embryo three times round the new golf
links, of which he is such an enthusiastic hon. sec."

At the same--"That it never would have happened if the timepiece in
the boudoir had not been forty minutes slow--despite the fact that
when Cupid gets both arms full he is apt to forget to keep an eye on
the clock."

In Great Maryborough Street--"That His Lordship's friends would
certainly have succeeded in finding the required bail: but that it
was Her Ladyship who prevented them."

At Holloway--"That it was additionally unfeeling of Her Ladyship to
restrain His Lordship's friends from providing him with suitable
food, but that he contrived to support existence till the morning on
some Nubian blacking and a sickly pot of egg-plants which had been
abandoned by a former occupant."

On Deeside--"That it is quite true, as the Honourable Mrs
Tufflold-Knutt informed the _Era_ interviewer after her recent
private theatricals, that she doesn't _really_ know how old she is."

At the same--"That if we were anything approaching the same age we
wouldn't want to know, either."

At the Hotel Sessil--"That Mr Pierpoint Morgan, who is carrying
everything but his coattails before him, is about to subsidise the
Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway (which connects also with Joppa by
sacred-bull team) so that the 10.45 A.M. daily from Tyre (the famous
"Flying Levite") will now be electrified and re-upholstered; and
ice-water, boxes of figs, and cheap editions of 'The Strenuous Life'
and 'Mr Dooley' will be obtainable on all cars."

In Jermyn Street--"That the mystery surrounding the disappearance of
the Honourable Hughie's socks, whilst their owner was being massaged
on Tuesday, has not been cleared up; meanwhile the attendant declares
on oath that Hugh brought none with him."

At the same (in the Cooling Room)--"That Hugh prized them more
particularly from the fact that he bought them years ago in a tavern
bar in Old Broad Street of a now leading light of the Kaffir market."

At the Bazaar in Aid of the Asylum for Disabled Thought
Readers--"That Lady Ena considers the husband who goes to Lhassa and
remains there a greater benefactor than the one who returns home
unexpectedly."

At the same--"That the introduction of the flurried individual as
'the famous telepathic faith-healer from Athens' was an exceedingly
clever bit of invention, all in sixty seconds, although the
'faith-healer' more than once came perilously near wrecking
everything by causing the Athenian to chatter alternately the pidgin
of a Bowlamine Chinaman and brogue of a music-hall Irishman."

At the same--"That blind faith, insatiable hope, and boundless
charity are unquestionably the principal ingredients in Lord Samuel's
composition."

Grieved indeed am I to hear that a bad oyster, carelessly swallowed
while laughing at Lord Archbold's diverting story of the old
donkey-woman at Ramsgate, who neglected Sterne's admonition to keep
one's eye on one's ass has kept you to your room of late, but if your
winning enough to take you to Lincoln depends on my telling you of a
"fetid, mephitic outsider which will be certain to fiddle into the
first three in the Handicap," you will stay away from bleak Carholme
this spring; but from your remark that you are experiencing a "stern
touch of stuckology," I judge that the last litter of blue Persians
was a flam.  Though this is perhaps as well, since prosperity
swallows up one's energy and obscures one's virtues, I regret that I
cannot at the moment indicate a prize strain of felines that will
reproduce its species for the sale-bench once a fortnight, while
their owner is mastering the primary principles of Bridge.  Should I
hear of one at the Dome, during "Israel in Egypt" to-night, however,
I will put a blue tag on it and reserve it for you.

What odd things servants do say at times!  Do you know, Patricia, as
Marshall was dressing my hair this morning, she suddenly exclaimed,
"Aren't you surprised to learn, my lady, as how the Earl o' Mintstalk
was once a domestic servant?"  And when I asked her what on earth she
meant, she said "Anyway he admitted before Sir Francis Joon
yesterday, that for years before they was married her leddyship was
his _mistress_!"

But there goes the dinner gong and, as an admirable chef is easily
slighted and I am just about as ravenous as a hyæna with tapeworm,
adios, little one, adios!

  Your affectionate friend,
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE XI

EATON SQUARE, _Friday, April_ 8_th._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

Should you chance to have by you such a thing as a disused buffalo
motor-coat, a suit of cast-off oilskins, or any other old garment
which is too conspicuous to donate to the ordinary social leper,
would you kindly send it to the P. and O. Agents at Marseilles--in
the Rue Noailles, I think--to await the return of poor Euphemia
Hulcot, whose high motives have been so shamefully tampered with by
the Japanese Censor at the front that she is returning to pickle the
walnuts and label the jam at her home in Kent, but desires to
re-enter London unobserved?  Arriving with the Imperial Army at Wiju,
literally tingling with the desire to nurse back to health the
victims of the spiteful _jui-jitsu_ (or whatever is the name of the
national ambidextrous cussedness) and incidentally to paint
comprehensive word pictures for the _Ladies Sphere_, she found it not
at all nice to be allocated, under fixed arms, to a quiet hamlet
consisting of a house and barn, once made of rice paper, containing a
wild cat and a pack of cards, and situated on a sandy ridge between
two millet fields.  She certainly had told off to see that she didn't
go away, two little brown men with half a pair of crimson overalls
between them, who told Japanese stories which no lady could possibly
have heard had they not been related with an accent that was simply
delicious to listen to; also she was given a bamboo gun that would
carry popcorn as far as where the sitting-room window had been
knocked out (and most of the wall along with it) but with strict
instructions in the event of an outbreak to return the weapon at once
to the sentries.

All this was well enough in a way, but the disabilities far
outweighed the advantages, and at any reference to war the little
brown men became mentally opaque.  Thus when Euphemia attempted to
"draw" them by comparing the situation to the first campaign in Italy
in 1796, they professed not to have heard of Napoleon as a fighter,
though they remembered all the others, including Jack Dempsey and Gus
Ruhlin; moreover the only accommodation offered a lady correspondent
wishing to change her garments was the open country behind the ha-ha,
or mimosa, bush.

At first Euphemia merely protested in a formal way, but finding this
of no avail, she ultimately insisted on being taken before General
Kuroki, to whom (despite his many polite protests that he was already
five minutes overdue on a previous engagement to hold a hand-to-hand
argument with General Kuropatkin in a mudfield at Ping Yang) she
explained that it might be just as well if he understood that,
although she had temporarily assumed the duties of special
correspondent to the _Ladies Sphere_, she was the most strictly
virtuous and religious unmarried lady that ever came out of a country
where the easiest thing imaginable for a smart girl to do was to
marry any man she wanted to; that though the average Japanese lady
was so inviolably sacred that she was kept indoors till she
degenerated into a sort of tit-bit of family furniture, you couldn't
come that racket on the rosebuds of the West, where no man was
obliged to feel the burden of daughters who took proper care of their
early education.  She didn't see anything in that to grin at.  Her
family had fought and bled for Great Britain since before
boxing-gloves were invented--till, in fact, it had come to be
regarded as the country's standing Gibraltar; and she didn't propose
to travel twelve thousand miles to be shut up in a tissue-paper
bandbox with nothing but an Asiatic wild cat to which she had not
been properly introduced, to suit the likes of anybody.
Representatives of allied nations--she should not
particularise--might get transitorily dippy over winning one or two
skirmishes with hairy convicts done up in padded ulsters; but "who
was't betrayed the Capitol; who lost Marc Antony the world; who was
the cause of a long ten years' war and laid at last old Troy in
ashes"?  A snubbed lady correspondent at the front, she believed.

The General made no reply--a man's real character is only visible in
moments of intense emotion--but, signalling for a fountain pen to a
soldier who had just got a hammer-lock on a Seoul ploughboy whom he
had spotted passing with a pocketful of contraband gingerbread, he
wrote out the following and gave it to Euphemia with a kiss and a
large red apple which he had brought with him from Anju:


"_To our Soldiers in General, and the_ 10_th Osaka Mounted Assassins
in especialty.  See to it:_

"_That our well-beloved sister, Euphemia of the Greyhound Legs, the
Unwon Bosom, the acquired staccato trot of Tokio; being neither
geisha, fleur-de-lit, nor ex-swell rag from the Transwaal, stayeth
out of doors as late as she listeth.  She doth it for the love of us,
and she's copyright, she is.  Nix general orders; to the C Division
say she is our laidifriend and has our private countersign, 'Pass the
beancake.  Banzai!_'

"_May your wounds be as halfpence in the Dai Ichi Ginko,_

"_KUROKI._"


Being an advanced disciple of freethought and consequently holding no
superstitions as to the eating of apples, Euphemia at once publicly
consumed one half of the red pippin, giving the remaining half, with
the large, fat worm in it, to the sentry; but matey as the General
had seemed, he really had neither soul nor conscience behind his
little brown eyes.  From the time Euphemia accepted that special
permit, she was as nobly a fool-on-furlough as the darkest African
belle that ever was satisfied with a piece of red cloth or a handful
of glass beads.  Honeyed as that written watchword looked, it was
substantially the roughest turn-down that ever was put into cipher.
Officers to whom Euphemia produced it shed torrents of tears out of
formal politeness, but knew exactly how many pieces of luggage she
was carrying, and precisely what sort of stockings she had on; and
daily she realised that she was drawing nearer, nearer, nearer to the
outposts.  One evening a lieutenant-colonel of infantry, so
repulsively plain that his poor face actually ached from the pain
caused by its terrible shape, put a mark like a Whistlerian butterfly
on the top corner of the passport, and thereafter, the soldiers who
inspected it--and Euphemia--simply whistled through their teeth at
her.  At Feng-huan-cheng she was imprisoned for ten hours and slapped
on parade before all ranks for applying the term "a nasty, insulting,
old barn-choote" to a brigadier-general who had passed upon her some
remark which, though unintelligible, was doubtless coarse, since it
caused the sentries to drop their weapons and roll on the floor with
laughter: at Taku-shan the captain of the blockhouse read the
warrant, smiled at Euphemia, counted his money, then shrugged his
shoulders and motioned to her to pass away; it was the same all
through the lines.  To this or that person in high office she
applied, day by day, in docile and submissive mood, but, like the
small boy who was eaten by the domesticated lion in the circus at
Barnsley, went away in a pet.

Everywhere and all the day, she says, the stranger's leg is
vigorously pulled.  Even the little Jap who, during his convalescence
after being wounded at Souchou, embroidered for her with alleged
cherry-blossoms a square of black satin, gave her his name as Ohara
Whirroo; and she has since discovered that the silk-stitched blossom
bears a strange and striking resemblance to the potato-plant.
Ultimately catching the infectious habit of dissembling the most
unpleasant convictions, she taught herself at last to round-off the
most conventional common-places with some such phrase as "Thanks,
thou colossal and incomparable object of envy to Ananias; thanks!"

But her pity for the wounded Russians who fell into her hands was
very real--as well it might be.  They were brought to fight from the
prisons on the convict island of Sakahalin, and had to bear the brunt
of the battle in proportion to their past offences.  Thus, the first
line of defence was composed of murderers, money-lenders,
manufacturers of inflammable flannelette underclothing, and pleaders
of the Gaming Act.  The second consisted chiefly of stewards of
hunt-meetings, burglars, baby-farmers, and dermatologists from West
Virginia convicted of grafting male skin on to female chins to supply
the market with bearded ladies for freak museums; the last line of
all being the defaulters of alimony and the unmuzzled dog summonses.
The greatest grievance of all was perhaps that which was cherished by
an exile from Warsaw, whose internal clockwork had been rudely
disarranged by eighteen inches of triangular steel at the end of a
Nagasaki musket at Chongju.

"It's all very well for these here Japs to blow about dispensin'
justice distilled to an essence," he remarked to Euphemia, "but to be
bayoneted in the _gutz_* for failin' to abate a smoky chimney is a
bit sultry, ain't it?"


* A purely Muscovite idiom for the pantry parts, the seeming crudity
of which is to be deplored.


A few days ago, Phyllis Waring was keenly desirous that I should
accompany her to Paris to see if _Monsieur le Matou_ is a suitable
piece to put on at the forthcoming performance by the Copthebird
Strollers in aid of the Asylum for the Indignant Blind, but as I am
rather fed up with the French (to say nothing of the idiotic
Strollers, whose sixteen skittish lady amateurs are already
quarrelling as to which first takes "Dick" when _Whittington_ is
produced next Christmas) who sorely need some good and true friend to
point out to them that, having invented matrimony, as they are fully
persuaded they did do, it was unlike them not to patent it and
thereby secure their just fees and royalties; and as, unlike myself,
Phyllis evinces no desire to shun the ephemeral intimacies that
travellers are so ready to establish, she would be sure to find some
chivalrous male person aboard the boat to hold her head at the
taffrail, I did not go.  And now it seems that _Monsieur le Matou_ is
but a rehashing of the old, old _ménage à trois_ idea, for knowing
naught of which poor Uriah of Scripture history got steered against
his Waterloo.  Poor Uriah!  Himself entertaining Hittitic objections
to bathing--(he simply hated sanitation and always swore that it
would hasten his end)--he still had gentlemanliness enough to relax
his customary surveillance while his fair wife performed the
ablutions which he admired but did not understand, and he sate down
outside on the little cork mat, smiling to think how well-beloved he
was quite apart from any question of money.  He smiled again in a
self-satisfied way as he heard the water splashing within, for he
remembered how he had said on first seeing the laving tank when he
took over the new house, "Aha!  Some silly fool will be drowned in
this, but it won't be me!" and there and then did he renew his vow
that the only way they should ever get him into the thing would be to
chloroform him first.  Poor Uriah!  How little did he suspect that,
even at that moment, there was creeping on his royal stomach across
the tiles--

But I must not bore you to death with all this moralising, dear.

In _Monsieur le Matou_ the tertium quid is an operatic tenor who,
adoring Madame la Chatte for her dulcet tones alone, drops in to try
her voice, while M. le Matou is at the chase, pursuing the
bloodthirsty hare, the fierce hedge-sparrow.  At the psychological
moment--just as Madame closes her eyes to take the upper C--Monsieur
bursts in, a plume in his hat, a tasselled bag hanging from his neck,
a very arsenal bristling in his brown belt.  Instantly the wretched
pair, while imploring him to spare their lives, fall at his feet,
implying that, if the worst comes to the worst, they will, like the
man who was on a hiding to nothing the first time Tom Sayers saw him,
"take it lying down."

"No, no!" cries M. le Matou, pronouncing the tag as the stage hands
take hold of the guy ropes in readiness for a quick curtain, "I do
not purpose to destroy you here, but you will find that my terms are
worse than death itself (sensation).  They are that you, sir, do this
very night take her with you to Marseilles (increased sensation) by
the 9.15 on the Paris-Lyons-et-Méditerranée!" (loud groans and
hisses, several ladies in the audience who have in the course of
their checkered careers been inveigled into this train, swooning away
in their fauteuils).

After the manner of British adventurers into France, Phyllis rends
the restaurants (and the native tongue) without mercy, but she will
have to be told that there is really no such word in the French, or
any other language, as "Kwezeen," and no necessity for it; though,
truly, it was commendable moderation in her not to write "Kweezeen,"
as is commonly done by the otherwise gifted authoress of "How to Give
a Monday Lunch for a Dozen without Spending a Tosser."  The correct
thing is "cuisine," and to spell things with a "K" which look softer
with a "C" is to prove that one was born when the sign was wrong.  It
is news, however, that the wearing of captive insects is again _de
rigueur_; and Phyllis was fortunate enough to secure a magnificent
specimen of a dark green hunting-cased cockchafer, held by a gold
chain.  It must have looked awfully chic, she says, as she sat in the
fauteuils of the Odeon, but it unfortunately got into a fight with
the armour-plated tiger-beetle of the lady sitting behind, and,
losing its off forceps in the second round, was pounced upon by the
watchful harlequin scarabæus, or "Cairo timberman," of the lady on
Phyllis's left, with which it more than held its own until the
audience yelled for M. Poe to enter the ring and separate them.
Phyllis does not despair of nursing the great green beauty back to
its former health, but it has incurred a fearful "mouse," she says,
and will hereafter wear a "thick ear" to its dying day.

The first flower that blooms in the spring, dear, is the nettle, and
though mere seasonage never yet caused Féo's perennial human
poisonous plant a second's uneasiness, Mr Contango has just stung her
"good and plenty," as they say at the Sessil, by getting run in on a
consolidated charge of assault and battery, also defamation of the
character of prosecutor's sister, obstructing the thoroughfare of
Swallow Street, Regent Street, whilst drunk and incapable, and
damaging a constable's uniform.  It is a narrow and craven story,
though the verification of some of the charges at the first hearing,
which terminated in a remand, brought a sweet-and-twenty smile to the
stern-and-sixty dial of the salaried Solon who exists only to
side-pocket his patrons.

To a lady who resided in Burleigh Mansions and who, while appearing
in court in a tight-fitting frock of blue silk with a white Panama
pulled well down over her eyebrows, claimed the modern privilege of
remaining heavily veiled and testifying as "Mrs X.," Mr Contango had
given a cheque for five pounds, the only consideration being (he
said) that it was to form the nucleus of a fund which "Mrs X.," and
several other society ladies were promoting to purchase the penny
steamboat _Citizen_, now moored off Cleopatra's Needle, and fit her
up as a hospital ship for service in the Yellow Sea.  Though "Mrs
X.'s" family, counsel said, was a notable old Saxon one and might
have altered English History had not her early ancestor, who treated
Edward the Confessor for scrofula, met his death whilst cat shooting
in the Royal Forest of Pimlico, owing to the bullet leaving his
weapon at the butt, she undoubtedly had a brother who was at the
present time a cabman.  She admitted having mentioned this person to
the prisoner with reference to the hospital ship, her relative, who
had frequently observed that "cabbing was no conjure," having said
give him a barrel of bitter and the run of a bedstead shop, and he
would transform the _Citizen_ into the talk of the Thames.  She had
also seven sisters, six of whom were willing to leave the stage to
become hospital-ship nurses, but the seventh, who had freckles and a
cock eye, had permanently settled in the postal service.  But the
payment of five pounds had nothing whatever to do with marine matters
and she didn't think any the more of the prisoner, who _called_
himself a gentleman, for trying to shift the cut on her in that way.

Meantime the cheque, having been enthusiastically dishonoured, was
returned to "Mrs X.," who subsequently sold it for two shillings as a
natural curiosity to another of her brothers, who, as Charlie Upham,
kept a starting-price office for military turfites of approved
references in Swallow Street.  In this capacity Upham was quite well
acquainted, and occasionally did business, with Mr Contango, up to
the time when the latter had five half-dollars on Pitch Battle at
Nottingham, at 100 to 12, and was offered, in settlement, his own
discredited stumer, a postal for three bob, and twenty-eight
half-penny stamps.  It was then that he assaulted and battered Upham
in his office, and was flung out of the window, amid the thunder of
the captains and the shouting; and the humane C Division of police,
finding him lying on his back, too frail to withstand the
contamination and wickedness of the outer world, reversed him by his
wrists and ankles, and carried him inside.

Féo no sooner heard of it than, with the promptitude of a Napier, she
rang up that old and trusted repository of shameful secrets, our
family solicitor--by which please do not misunderstand me to mean our
City, or put-and-call solicitor, who is so bewitching a figure at
dramatic first nights; our smart solicitor, who hangs up his red golf
jacket and takes down the _Cause List_ with a large yawn; or our mere
buffer solicitor, who is rude to rural benches over our
furious-driving summonses; but our old family solicitor.  She rang up
Mr Coke and bleated that her latest needs were far too sacred to be
related over the phone with Gerrard listening, but would he take the
very first vehicle on the rank, no matter if it were only a
dust-cart, and come to her instantly.  And he did.

It was raining rather smartly as they left the house, some twenty
minutes later, and the old lawyer had brought no brolly; but Féo
could not possibly order the carriage for such an odious destination
as Brixton Stir; she could not even suffer a hansom to be whistled to
the door.

"Give Mr Coke an umbrella," she cried, as though she herself were
contemptuous of the weather, and two footmen in powder instantly drew
from the stand an elegant parapluie with an ebon stick, surmounted by
a crutch of tortoise shell bound and heeled with eighteen-carat gold.

All through the long ride to the prison at Brixton, Féo lay back in
the shadows of the four-wheeler's cushions in gloomy silence, her
bosom rent by conflicting emotions.  For years past she had lain her
very life--she who had the figure of Diana and the beauty of an
Aphrodite--at the clay feet of a man who now regarded her only as
nine stone of stale cake.  Against his myriad infidelities she had
promulgated no decree, well knowing that it would only be disobeyed
in such hearty fashion as to reduce to _débris_ the prestige of
wifely authority; but her soul had sunk within her when she had heard
how her Sandown badge had been worn by the kitchenmaid at the Skittle
Club; she had groaned aloud when asked to believe that such a wire as
"For heaven's sake send her a 'monkey' to shut up" was merely an
impassioned appeal by an unknown London solicitor to a perfect
stranger, on behalf of a ruined old lady litigant who only yearned
for an ape to keep in confinement and make a pet of.  For any woman
in the throes of such woe as this, it was the refinement of torture
to read of the Chinaman who believes implicitly in his wife's
fidelity so long as he sneezes once in an hour, and whose wife
persuades him always to wear a wet handkerchief inside his hat to
keep his dear old shaved pate cool.  Yet China was a cultured nation
a thousand years before Britain showed the slightest sign of becoming
the delightful Nonconformist poultry-yard she is to-day.  Socially,
no less than matrimonially, Contango was a complete fizzle.  A sable
evening suit he simply loathed, but took a positive pride in the
frayed and unravelled "County-court" shirt in which he "appeared"
before tribunals, which reduced the claims of his more importunate
creditors to crossing-sweepers' doles of a crown a month, and
sometimes he got judicial "orders" set aside indefinitely.  He did
daily homage to his judgment-summons alpaca-jacket, and bowed down
and worshipped his judge-in-chambers brown billycock; but all these
things were as goads and undergarments of horsehair to Féo, who, now
that the miserable backslider was under lock and key, could not
decide whether in view of future peace of mind it was not more
desirable to keep him in than to get him out.

They found him in his cell at Brixton, sprawling in a wooden chair in
a Martin Harvey attitude, but not wholly broken in spirit--indeed, he
had only recently passed some remarks about the administration of the
civil law in England, of such a character that the head warder had
resigned his long-coveted office simply in order to avoid future
contiguity to Middlesex debtors in general.  Though Féo tearfully
addressed Contango by his pet name, he only stared at her vacantly
and bit his nails.  Then his wandering eyes fell, for the first time
ever, upon the old attorney, and the result of their brief inspection
was clearly unfavourable.  His first glance of scornful indifference
quickly hardened into a deeply interested stare, and the debtor even
raised himself upon his elbows and finally inclined his body
forwards, the closer to continue his scrutiny.  Tinge by tinge the
passion rose in his face till at last he sprang from his seat.  In a
burst of fury he turned upon the octogenarian from the Temple.

"Strike me up a plum tree, this is too, too thick!  You may have
taken advantage of my temporary incarceration to supplant me in the
affections of my wife, you hoary remnant of sin and senility!" he
shrieked, "but I'll be eternally damned if you, or any other man,
holds successional rights in my best umbrella!  Come on!"

With that he literally showered blows--roughly estimated by a
visiting J.P. who was slowly recovering from the jumps--at 300,000 in
number, but probably less, since Mr Coke's prostrate body was
recovered, minus the umbrella, within nine or ten minutes; whereas,
even if the punches came at the rate of 250 a minute, which is quick
work----

But I am not sure that I do not prefer to run downstairs to lunch,
and leave the problem, if they care to solve it, to the bright young
mathematicians of the seventh page of the _Daily Mail_, who, given
three figures and a bit of chalk, can be backed to figure the knocker
off the front door at any time.

  Au revoir, ma chère,
      VIOLA.




EPISTLE XII

EATON SQUARE, _Friday, May_ 12_th._.

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

The postmark on your cheery little note to hand this morning throws a
lurid light on the cat-like sneak you executed out of Charbonell's
last Friday afternoon, after positively insisting that I should drink
a dish of tea with you.  As I told you at the time, I once swore to a
relative, since dead, never to touch tea until I wanted it; but I had
no idea that you contemplated wolfing three chocolate eclairs and a
buttered scone and proceeding direct to Paris, even though, as you
aver, you acted upon a sudden impulse to write a Rita-like series of
articles for _The Gentlewoman_ entitled "What I saw in Montmartre."
A graphic description from a capable pen of what you did not see in
Montmartre would be far more likely, I think, to increase the
circulation of any newspaper.  I had meant asking you on which three
nights of this week you could make use of our box at the Opera, but
as your letter is headed merely "Wednesday," which I didn't seem to
think would find you in a big place like Paris, I simply couldn't--as
the fair candidate for the chorus of the new musical-comedy remarked
on observing that her mother had put out a pink flannelette set for
her to go and have her voice "tried" in.  Anyway, I hope that you may
have an exciting and adventurous time in Lutetia, a desire which I
express with increased confidence since reading in this morning's
newspapers, that bands of impoverished but resourceful Parisians are
earning a precarious livelihood by throwing young women, ostensibly
of the unfortunate class, into the Seine, and then rescuing them
under the eyes of the benevolent.

I have, by the way, something more than a fanciful and fantastic
notion that Paris may hold me within the next forty-eight hours, for
our household is at the moment as intolerable to me as was that of
the ambitious young gentleman who, in defence of his alleged want of
family pride, pleaded that it was expecting too much of one whose
father was in Dartmoor, whose sister was in Regent Street, and whose
mother was going about London with a wen as big as a diving-bell.  As
usual, Mr Contango is at the bottom of the spasm.  But while the
brilliancy and variety of that man's errors throw a reflected glory
upon his inventive genius and effectually preclude the possibility of
his turning over a new leaf without investing in an entirely fresh
book, his repeated backslidings are surely undermining the nerves,
and consuming the very molecules and corpuscles of Féo's delicate
physical adjustment.  No sooner is one epoch of recidivation bottled
up by a sickening course of vespertinal canoodling than another
severe slump, calculated to cause the entire building to vibrate, is
ripening in some other quarter, until it really seems that the only
domain in which Mr Contango could be confidently relied upon to keep
out of trouble, would be an iron-barred niche high on the face of the
most inaccessible peak of Popocatapetl.

When I went to her boudoir this morning to execute a quick touch for
the price of some long-coveted green tourmaline pendants, Féo was
reclining on the sofa, like the gentleman who sat down "unbeknownst"
on the box of fusees, face downwards, and sobbing her very heart out.
A torn blue envelope, inscribed in the familiar hand of our hired
Sherlock, which lay upon the floor, told me instantly that the
dreadful Contango had once again been weighed in the balances and
found several hundredweight against the purchaser; but with the
"Festina lente" of the Onslows ever before me, I contented myself by
inquiring the interesting nature of the poor wretch's vapours--and
that in the most frigidly cucumberish fashion.

It appeared that on a not very remote evening she was being driven
across Piccadilly Circus towards the Strand, when a block in the
traffic caused the carriage to pull up almost directly in front of
the Criterion Bar.  At first Féo scarcely noticed the stoppage, the
pleasant tide of her thoughts running on the recent, self-instituted
moral reformation of Mr Contango, he having begun, according to his
own account, to make "great gobs of the wherewith" by following
financial journalism in the City.  Than this nothing in the world
could be likelier, since he really has a most persuasive literary
style and, indeed, once wrote a letter of condolence to the widow of
a bookmaker (killed in a sort of paper-chase by a blow from a bottle)
which was so convincing that no sooner had the anguished relict read
it than she put off her mourning, took a couple of phenacetin
tabloids, and went out to a music-hall.  Mr Contango's further
assurances that he had absolutely renounced the use of hot and
rebellious liquors, Féo more readily believed, she told me, since she
had only that very morning poured him out seven tumblers of cold
water before rising.  As the period of her detention in the middle of
the Circus by the rozzer in the rubber overalls became unreasonably
prolonged, however, she lowered the carriage window and--did so just
in time to behold a most sickening spectacle.  The glazed doors of
the American Bar were suddenly thrown open by an unseen force, and Mr
Contango was projected violently into the road!  So vigorous was the
propelling power behind him, said Féo, that he cleared the pavement
as if he had been dynamited horizontally, and he would have bitten
the dust but that his nose seemed to be in the way.  As he arose with
bleeding proboscis and hurled at his projector a string of sunset
adjectives, which it was quite impossible for her to hear in the
presence of servants, Féo saw clearly that Mr Contango had vineleaves
in his hair, so, sinking back upon the cushions of the carriage, she
was borne to her destination in the collapsed condition so
graphically described by Dr Harris Ruddock as "the engine with the
fly-wheel gone."

Not until the following afternoon did Mr Contango return to Eaton
Square, when (although Féo has since ascertained that he ate a
soothing, if vulgar, supper of tripe and onions in a kitchen in
Pimlico) the explanation he gave of his damaged family feature was
that he had been trying a bicycle in the street and got a flat
wheel--fortunately just outside the hospital into which the
bystanders carried him.  With unusual wisdom Féo expressed no
comment, but instituted the inquiries to which the torn blue envelope
had brought the sequel.  Crystallised, it was as follows:

There is, so say Féo's sleuth-hounds, no art known to moderns (save
that of the subdolous Somerset Street _passé_ face-fakirs who remove
crow's feet, beetling eyebrows, and double chins, and restore and
preserve youthfulness in ten successive ninety-minute "treatments" at
one-guinea-and-a-half per) which is netting more money for its
artificers than the art of "telling the tale," and in a branch of
this industry which he has made peculiarly his own, has Mr Contango
been reaping the golden results erroneously attributed by Féo to
honest literary labour.  In the buffet-bars, the music-halls, and
"other places where they sing" in the wide world of cheap flutter, Mr
Contango (in whose family, Féo now remembers having been told by a
palmist, poverty has predominated over honesty from pre-historic
times) has been in the habit of encountering the young gentlemen best
adapted to his purpose.  Féo's inquiry-agents describe these
individuals as "the juvenile jays of convivial commercialdom," but I
prefer to preserve an impartial lukewarmth in the matter.  In their
proper sphere they are, I feel convinced, quite genuine persons
though of the unfortunate kind that cannot get away in the afternoon,
and are therefore the more likely to be entrapped when dolled up and
out for the evening.  It is a lamentable but incontrovertible
solecism, I am told, that many young men who are highly moral--almost
German-Reed--at heart, are inwardly never happier than when suspected
of disreputable tendencies.

Entering any bar or public place where one of these odd creatures,
attired in an evening suit of eccentric cut and showing a scarlet
silk handkerchief protruding from the waistcoat, chances to be
lounging, deeply cogitating whether the obviously interested
onlookers take him for the latest turf plunger or the French Embassy,
Mr Contango immediately gives an elaborate exhibition of surprise and
delight.

"Why, my dear old lad!" cries he, rushing up and taking the poseur by
both fists, "this is indeed red and yellow wine for me!  To think
that I haven't set eyes on you since Lincoln, and last week was the
Two Thousand!  And you, above all others, who never by any chance
missed a Newmarket?  Too bad, too bad; we were a melancholy crowd
without you; no little menus, no cards; to bed with the chickens, and
the Rooms at midnight as soundless as a Libyan desert!  Now what
prevented you: something fresh in petticoats, I'll wager?"

Flattered and confused by all this, the simpleton hesitates.  His
sense of rectitude prompts some such reply as "You have the advantage
of me," or, alternatively, "I think you are mistaken"--(see Mixitt's
"Art of Polite Conversation."  One Shilling.  At all
book-stalls)--but his vanity forbids it.  To be mistaken for anybody
rather than plain Tom Cobley is, in fact, the very keynote to the
assumption of the funny evening kit, the ludicrous red hanky; that
the conversation happens to be so much above his head is very
regrettable, but still no fault of his--indeed he has not as yet
uttered one single word.  And if, after all, he sufficiently
resembles this racing celebrity, this young blood so gifted and
accomplished that his mere absence from a "First Spring" causes the
whole of Newmarket to be plunged in melancholy, why should _he_,
plain Tom Cobley, be under the obligation of making, in front of a
score of strangers--for an audience soon gathers--the humiliating
admission that, far from being "dear old lad," he is not a turfite at
all but a--well, private individual from the hindquarters of Oxford
Street?  So, seeing no great harm in winging a little, he replies,
with absolute truth:

"No, it was nothing in petticoats"--(quite probably he is in the
"Ribbon and Lace," and not the "Underclothing" at all)--"but
something quite different that detained me.  But I must be going now."

"Lucky dog! lucky dog!" then cries Mr Contango.  "For ever hammering
on the anvil of passion, and drinking only, as did your illustrious
forebears, out of the satin shoes of their mistresses.  But--er--I
really _must_ have _one_ word with you before you go: you can guess
what about, eh?"

"Indeed, I can't."

"Aye, there comes your patrician breeding again, lad!  A noble
nature, inherited from a long line of exalted sires, confers on you
the privilege of forgetting your benefices to your friends!  Mean to
say you have forgotten the fiver which you generously pressed upon me
as we came off the course at Lincoln?"

"Absolutely," replies the youth, utterly out of his depth, but
discerning no danger.

"Then let me try and recall the circumstances to your mind.  I had
had a dash on Merry Andrew for the last race--with what result you
know: Ariosto chopped him at the start and was never headed.  I was
absolutely stranded for ready cash--positively without my railway
fare on to Liverpool--when you--may heav'n bless you for your
generous act--leapt into the breach.  I have fortunately a blank
cheque here----"

At this he would draw from a quilted-satin note case a green cheque
form, and continue: "--and, for once, I may discharge my debt, though
never my obligation.  Meantime, old college-companion, pray
condescend to take one parting drink with me--nay, be pleased to let
me pay: 't may seem like Lazarus entertaining Dives, but no matter.
Barkeeper, two special liqueurs of the Imperial O.V.H., a large
'polly divided, and--the pen and the inkhorn, quick!"

By now, Cobley's entanglement is greater than his brain can compass.
He has allowed his ineptitude to sink him to the level of a common
swindler; yet the hard-shelled fact that the position is none of his
seeking is being shouted through an unseen megaphone into his ear by
an invisible Adversary of Souls.  Were it not for the accursed,
gaping mob, he would chance making a clean breast of it; but the
truth will not bear all lights.  At worst he must accept the draft
and contrive to return it privately, later on.

"Here we are, dear lad," cries Mr Contango, finishing the writing
(and poor Cobley's reflections) and flourishing the cheque, "I have
made it for a tenner because I find that I have just run out of
silver, but if you will let me have a couple or three sovereigns just
to carry me home, you can send your man round to Coutts's in the
morning and slip me the remainder to-morrow night, or to-morrow
twelvemonth, or--well, whenever I ask you for it.  Aha!  I'm about as
fond of asking a fellow for money as you are, dear boy!"

It is then that Mr Cobley falls slap into the net and sinks just as
deeply as he has cash available--for I presume that even you, dear,
are not so innocent in this "sordid and merciless age of
industrialism" as to suppose that the cheque is of any more service
to anybody than a stomach-ache.  It is a very real lesson in the art
of banking that Mr Cobley receives as the bank cashier returns him
the stumer with the additional inscription of "N.E."--"No Earthly"
upon it.  He sees at a glance precisely how much smaller his
expenditure for the year will be since his little envelope for the
month of May has been put through the wringer.  And what if he
subsequently lies in wait for Mr Contango with a view to
readjustments, I think I hear you ask?  Why, frankly, that would
afford him about as much real joy as secretly pinching the cork leg
of a lady stranger in a crowded omnibus.  Mr Contango would instantly
fetch him a crack across the mazzard with a bar towel, or some
similarly offensive weapon, and accuse him aloud of every sin both in
and out of the decalogue, not omitting the mysterious and only
unforgivable one which is barely outlined in the Book of Revelations;
he would, in short, do every objectionable thing within human
knowledge--short of personally summoning the police.  Estimating
(Féo's scouts conclude) the number of convivial commercialists put
through the hoop at three per night, and averaging the sum
contributed by each at fifty-seven-and-sixpence, Mr Contango has been
drawing an income of close upon three thousand a year from a source
previously exploited only by cheap tobacconists and abandoned
barmaids!

Is not it appalling?  But perhaps you do not know that the first
stone of the quite considerable pile left by the late Mr Sam Lewis
was laid by youthful ignorance of banking methods--not Samuel's
ignorance, dear; _he_ knew all about banks, from his youth up, and
quite frequently he took one.  He was originally, you must know, a
travelling jeweller, though upon a certain Monday morning when,
instead of continuing to travel, he sent word to his firm that his
liver was not acting--for all the world as though he expected that
indispensable organ to go on at the Gaiety in tights and trunks, and
a flaxen wig!--also that he was detained by an urgent matter of a
lucrative character, likewise he was bidden to the funeral ceremonies
of a very dear friend, not to mention his doctor's imperative orders
about staying in the house with so serious a suppressed cold; many a
conjecturing ear took a more forward inclination in the vain hope of
learning something a little more definite.  In reality, Samuel was
occupied in raising twenty thousand spangles for a young gentleman
who, after interviewing his pass-book, had come to the sickening
conclusion that he had overdrawn his banking account to about that
tune.  The poor boy had, in a lucid interval between drinks, sent for
the little parchment wallet and compared its totals in order to see
how much more money, if any, he had got to spend before he died, and
from even the most careless analysis of the figures there existed
between the right-hand columns and the left-hand columns a
discrepancy of £19,776, 11s. 7d.  The very natural conclusion to
which these figures, as well as a colossal ache in the back of his
head (By Christmas! how it did throb, throb, throb!) resigned him,
was that he must have had an even better time than it had seemed--a
distinct chunk of consolation in a way, but one that dug no subway
for the man who had got to find "a hundred" somehow for a real little
topweight, quite the very best that the dear old "Guv'nor" had ever
put on any stage.

It was, however, when dear old Sam (as those who paid up as well as
those who only renewed, alike addressed him) called in with the cash
and spread the bonnie crisp notes of the Bank of England all over the
blessed table that the sun took on new brightness.  For a single
glance at the inside of the pass-book disclosed to the genial Hebrew
the fact that, far from being overdrawn, the high-mettled lad, whose
magnificent ignorance of ledger-accounts only increased his nobility,
simply didn't know which side of the book was the other, and actually
had at that moment £19,776, 11s. 7d. standing to his credit.

"Anyhow," he remarked apologetically, after telling his man to fly
down to the bank and get four more cheque-books immediately, "there
must be thunder in the air, or something, for I'll take my oath I had
less to drink last night than I did all the rest of last week put
together."

Fancy you, dear kid, not knowing that, unlike the big drapery houses
of London, which think nothing of lending an overstrung divinity of
the footlights who may be expecting a bed-and-breakfast visit from an
old Girton chum, a silk nightie; of sending it home to the
_recherché_ little flat at the top of the two-hundred-and-sixty-two
stone steps, and of taking it back next morning after all the creases
and crow's feet, bar its warehouse ones, have been pressed out by the
great weight of some large literary work--Bunyan is about the
heaviest in our language--and its pink ribbons have made their first
rapid pass under a warm flat iron; the proprietors of les Grands
Magasins do not cordially endorse the system of sending out their
stock "on appro."  Ample facilities for "appro rapide" are afforded
on the premises to princesses of the blood and other noble damsels,
who do not object to discrown themselves and slip into some lawn or
batiste article of the _intime_ toilette at 9 f. 50 in the shadow of
a festoon of organdi muslins, or a bunch of shop-soiled ostrich
stoles, but the girl who cannot make up her unsettled mind until she
has got into the things in her own bedroom and, with her biggest
picture hat on and a chrysanthemum in her hair, has marched up and
down in front of her cheval glass singing "Won't you come home now,
Bill Bailey?" is invariably discouraged.  The hierophants of the
Louvre, who in their pudacity request even married men who are not
accompanied by their own wives to be good enough to conceal their
identity as far as possible, claim that the "appro Anglais" system
demoralises both the goods and the customers, but especially the
goods.

And, somehow, this vagrant mention of married men and their wives
reminds me to tell you that the impossible Invernairnes have quite
recently made it up and sworn eternal friendship again.  It came
about all unrehearsed and unexpectedly--at least so she told some two
or three hundred women at her club, in strict confidence and on the
distinct understanding that it went no further.  They have lately
been vegetating--in separate beds--in a sweetly rural spot called
Hampstead, where the liver-pad and the footpad derive mutual benefit
on Bank Holidays, and where all that one need do when one is hungry
is to pull up a carrot and milk the cow.  From a luxurious
sleeping-saloon on the first floor, Lady Invernairne could gaze
across miles and miles of the western heath; though the eastern view
from the palleted box-room on a higher floor, where his lordship lay
like a case of suspended animation, was less imposing, and, indeed,
consisted principally of whitewashed walls punctuated by a green door
with a small ace-of-diamonds window and a latch string in it.

One night a brilliant thunderstorm swept o'er the Heath, the thunder
rolling noisily down the very roofs of rainwashed slate, the heavens
parting to take flashlight pictures of the fertile valleys of North
Middlesex.  A forked blue flame played in the sky above the
crematorium at Golder's Hill, a ball of living fire dropped into the
lake at Hendon, and--the craven Lady Invernairne crept from her bed
to stand by her window and shake with terror, her eyes half closed
and her firm, fair bosom--in adaged phrase they used to "lay the
table" on her--turned temporarily to gooseflesh.  It is at such
times, when Nature scolds, that woman needs someone to comfort her
and hold her hand till daylight happens or the storm abates.  Never
dreaming of consequences, Lady Invernairne weakly called down from
the box-room the case of "suspended animation," and manlike, he
presumed----

But Féo, still a bunch of nerves, has just burst in to say that if a
fiver is sufficient recompense for two hours in the Turkish and three
plain dishes for dinner, I can be on.

It is.

  Toujours a toi,
      VIOLA.



THE END







*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77930 ***