IT was mid-June, but no Londoner of any intelligence could possibly have guessed it, because, instead of the temperature being absolutely Arctic, it was extremely warm—a condition of things which in England we are not accustomed to associate with the midsummer months. Middlesex, we must suppose, had somehow come into conjunction with the Dog-star, who had bent his beneficent rays onto the county, and given birth to a whole week-long litter of delicious dog-days. It was really hot; there was really a sun, a big, blazing, golden sun, instead of the lemon-coloured plate which in general shines so very feebly and remotely through the fog and dark mists of Thames-side, and this was not only delightful in itself, but it actually made the shade a delightful thing to get into. The tops of omnibuses were thick with folk, and the Londoner of even the parks and palaces left the black silk tube, with which he is accustomed to roast and destroy his few remaining hairs, at home, and wore a straw hat instead, even when he went out, as he usually did, to lunch—and didn’t care. Indeed, there was no reason why he should, since only the obviously insane wore top-hats in such weather, and insanity was surely a more serious defect to have on the head than straw. A thin blue haze hung over distances. Piccadilly, a hundred yards away, had a bloom upon it like the dust on a ripe plum, and horses (those intelligent animals) had followed the lead of their masters, and wore straw hats too, with rims coquettishly raised at the sides to allow plenty of ear-play. Sarsaparilla was on tap out of large yellow barrels, and the irresponsible happiness which only fine weather or a consciousness of virtue so pronounced as to be priggish can give, flooded the town like the sunshine itself. It may still be a question whether it is happiness that makes people good, or virtue that makes people happy, but there can be no doubt at all that beautiful weather makes us all somewhat kinder and more charitably disposed than we are wont to be in March, and also immensely happy, so that the Zadkiel of spiritual almanacs will probably be right in prophesying the coincidence of the millennium with real midsummer weather.

The haze of heat which made a plum of Piccadilly, which the progressive London County Council, after their affectionate visit to the broad boulevards of Paris, had, at enormous expense, widened by at least six inches, dealt still more magically, having more suitable material to work upon, with the Green Park, as seen from the windows of Thurso House, and with Thurso House as seen from the Green Park. For it was a great square Italian palace, which looked as if it had been taken straight from the Grand Canal at Venice, and its stately white walls of Portland stone, with its long rows of tall windows, wore an air of extraordinary distinction among its squat or gawky neighbours. The entrance to it, faced by a deep covered porch, supported on Roman-Corinthian pillars, was in Arlington Street, while towards the Park it was faced by a broad stone terrace, from which two curved staircases went down into the small formal Italian garden, screened from the Park itself by a hedge of tall lilacs. Thus, though it stood in the very centre of the beating heart of London, it was admirably quiet, and the bustle and hum of the streets came muffled to it, not causing disturbance and distraction, but rather stimulating to activity by its persistent though gentle reminder that the world was very busy indeed.

The dining-room was at the back of the house, and opened onto the broad terrace that ran the whole length of the building, and to-day the row of its eight huge windows was thrown wide, so that the lace curtains that prevented the Park lounger from looking in, but allowed the diner to look out, swayed and bulged and were withdrawn in the hot summer breeze that came like breaking waves against them, while the bourdon note of the busy town came in like the hum of great bees burrowing into golden flowers. Listening, you could divide the noise up into its component parts. The sound of human voices was there, and the tread of feet, the clip-clop of single horses, the tattoo of the hoofs of pairs, and the throb and rattle of machine-driven vehicles; but the ear receiving it without poised attention knew only that many busy lives were active, and many wheels rolling.

The room itself was parquetted with oak and walnut, and the floor, as befitted the heat and the season, was left bare, except for some half-dozen of silk Persian rugs that made shimmering islands on the sea of its shining surface. The wall which faced the Park was, indeed, rather window than wall, and was unadorned but for the brocaded curtains which were looped back from the windows; but the other three walls glowed with the presentments of bygone Raynhams. The first Lord Thurso was there, and his son, the first Earl, a portrait in peer’s robes by Reynolds, who had also painted the superb picture of his wife, and the great family group of them, with their two sons and a daughter, which hung over the Italian chimney-piece. The second Earl was there, too, the eldest boy in the family group, grown to man’s estate, and painted by Gainsborough. The picture of his wife was a Romney, with the red jewelled shadows of that master, while Lawrence was the artist for the next generation. Then, after a gap, bridged over in part by the elder Richmond, came the present Thurso and his wife, two brilliant and startling canvases, claiming kinship by right of their exquisite art with the earlier masters.

In other respects—for nothing could spoil these glorious decorations or the more smouldering brilliance of the painted ceiling—the room did not at this moment appear at the level of its best possibilities, for the floor was “star-scattered” with a multitude of small round tables in preparation for the supper of the ball that was to take place that night; while at the end, in front of the chimney-piece, was a long, narrow table, laid on one side only, for the very elect. Though numerous, they were to be very elect indeed, and whole constellations of stars and yards of garters would not find a place there to-night, but shine at the small round tables. In any case, however, so Catherine Thurso had arranged, everybody was going to have proper things to eat and drink, which should be presented to her guests’ notice in decent fashion. There was to be no buffet-supper for the mere rank and file, where, as at the refreshment-room of a railway-station, her friends would scramble for sandwiches and pale yellow drinks, with mint and anise and cummin floating about in them, among footmen who jogged their elbows with plates of strawberries, while the elect, Olympian-wise, refreshed themselves behind closed doors. To-night, in fact, Thurso House was to be reopened with a due regard for its stateliness and the huge hospitality that it ought to exercise after a period of ten lean years, so to speak, in which the late lord had lived alone here, with half the rooms closed, a secret and eccentric life. He had not even been wicked and held infamous revel, which would have been picturesque and full of colour; but he had only been morose, and shut himself up; miserly, and had not entertained anybody; gouty, and devoted to port. He had died just a year ago, and to-night the house was going to be launched again, after its period of dry-dock. Lady Thurso would almost have liked to rechristen it too. It was associated in her mind and in the mind of everybody else with such a very disagreeable old gentleman.

Lady Thurso, during these ten lean years, in which she and her husband had “pigged it,” as she expressed it, in a poky little house in Grosvenor Square, owing to the tightness of the purse-strings, had laid very solid foundations for the position she meant to occupy when she should be installed here. She fully intended to be magnificent, and to fill the place of mistress of this house in a manner worthy of it. But no one had a greater contempt than she for the modern hostess, who makes use of her time and money and position only to give enormous caravanserai entertainments, and to spend the rest of her days in going to similar functions provided by her friends. Such methods were futile: they never led to anything worth doing, while those who thought that by lavish entertainment they could get, socially speaking, anywhere that was worth getting to, made an even greater error. She had seen during these last ten years the incessant invasion of London by those whose sole invasive power was money and the willingness to spend it to any extent in order to be considered what is called “smart.” And she entirely disagreed with those ignorant and old-fashioned moralists who shook their heads and lifted up their voices in lamentations over the capitulation of London to the almighty dollar. London—all London that was worth anything, that is to say—had not, with all due deference to the loud crowings from Farm Street, capitulated in the very least to the almighty dollar, and those—there were many of them—who imagined that they were making a great splash in the world, and were becoming of social importance, merely because they were rich and willing to spend their money on bands and prima-donnas and ortolans, made a mistake almost pathetic in its ineptitude. Such folk never got anywhere really. They never became intime with the society they coveted, however many weird parties they gave, where one met the latest African explorer, or looked at magic-lantern slides of the bacillus of cholera, or turned out all the lights and observed the antics of radium, or listened (this was rather popular this year, for everybody was bent on improving his mind) to short lectures on the ideals of England or the remoteness of the stars. The poor dears thought they were laying the foundation of what they considered “smartness,” whereas they were only turning their houses into free restaurants, where the world, with the merest commonsense, went to be fed, if it had nothing better to do. There were, of course, others who had some further capacity than that of mere spending—people who were witty, agreeable, and with the power to charm. Certainly, their wealth helped such of them as desired, for some inexplicable reason, to have the details of their parties in the Morning Post; but it was not their wealth that gave them success, but their wit. As if anybody of sense cared whether the latest sensation of the music-halls came and did conjuring tricks or not, or whether they ate cold beef or picked and pecked through a two-hour dinner! What made going out to dinner pleasant was the intercourse with pleasant people, not the screeching of an operatic tenor or performing dogs. Of course, many people would go anywhere in order to be fed, if the food was decent; but then they “wiped their mouths and went their journey,” leaving the poor self-deceived hostess to think that she was going hand over hand up the social ladder.

Catherine Thurso, being half American by birth, was a compatriot of many of these, and her short, perfectly modelled nose went instinctively into the air when she thought of them. In London, she was sure, you could not become of any importance merely by spending money, though many people thought you could, and, indeed, thought they had. In New York, it is true, such a thing was not only possible, but easy, for there, so it seemed to her, the standard of social success was the preposterous character of your extravagance. But those who thought that the same recipe was good in London were wanting in the sense of moral geography. Wealth in London brought to your house shoals of the Hon. Mrs. Not-quite-in-it, second-rate pianists, and the crowd of everybody else who wanted to get on. Or if you flew a little higher in the way of intelligence, you could get harmless little connoisseurs who were full of second-rate information about the world in general and their own branch of art, who picked up mouldy Correggios and doubtful Stradivariuses. The cream of the second-rate could be skimmed by the wealthy, but unless they were something more, they got no higher than that. Your wealth could give you that and publicity, and the fatal error these pathetic climbers fell into lay in thinking that publicity meant celebrity, and that the fact that you had “been seen in the Park, looking charming,” meant anything at all. Her “ten lean years” had certainly not been spent in these futile strivings.

At this moment she was sitting with Jim Raynham, her husband’s younger brother, and Ruby Majendie—who, she hoped, would soon persuade Jim to marry her, for the sake of the happiness of them both—having lunch at one of those little round tables in the dining-room, in order to direct the decoration of the room for the supper this evening. Time, as usual, was precious with her to-day, and the minutes in which it was necessary to sit at a table and eat could thus be used. She had just given orders that all the hydrangeas, pale pink and pale blue, of which a perfect copse had been made at the far end of the room, should be taken away again, for really the Italian fireplace was much more decorative.

“Besides, hydrangeas always remind me of Mr. James Turner,” she said in parenthesis.

“And who is he?” asked Jim.

“He isn’t he—he’s it. It’s a little art gentleman, plump, like a bullfinch, with a little grey moustache. You must know him, because, when one lunches or dines out, he is invariably there, and he is invariably the one person whom one can’t remember. Hydrangeas remind me of him, because he looks as if he had been grown in a pot in a moderately warm greenhouse. He is like a hydrangea beginning to get stout, just as those dreadful shrubs are. He always opens conversation by saying that I cut him the other day in Bond Street. I explain that I didn’t see him, which is quite true. I never can see him.”

The florist had removed all the hydrangeas except a small group that screened the centre of the grate. These were the “choicest,” and he waited for further orders.

“No, take them all away,” called out Lady Thurso. “All, every one. Isn’t it so, Ruby?”

Ruby put her head on one side and looked.

“Yes, quite right,” she said. “I wish you wouldn’t always be right. Nobody else would have thought of having nothing there.”

“Because people don’t see the value of empty places,” said she. “They want to fill everything up—the walls, the fireplaces, the hours, everything. Oh, think of the unemployed! How nice it sounds! One works and subscribes and does all kinds of things for them, but if only they would be as kind, and work for the employed, so that they might be unemployed! Fancy having time to do nothing at all! That is the condition which I envy, though, of course, if it were offered me, like so many things I envy, I would not accept it, because it would mean parting with my individuality. But I would really give any sum to be able to buy a couple of hours this afternoon.”

“What for?”

“Why, to be unemployed. I want to sit in a chair and doze if I like. No, I think that would be waste; but for two hours to feel that I had nothing whatever to do. Who was it—Queen Elizabeth, I think—who said she wanted to be a milkmaid? Don’t you understand? I understand that enormously. I would even be a hydrangea, and stand in a pot, or be Mr. James Turner in his curator’s room, with nothing to do until it is closing time. Instead, I am supposed to belong to the leisured classes, and never have a moment. No ferns, either,” she called to the florist—“nothing at all.”

A footman was markedly waiting at her elbow to get in a word edgeways.

“The carriage is round, my lady,” he said.

Lady Thurso hastily finished an egg in aspic, with which she had begun lunch.

“For me?” she said.

“Yes, my lady. It was ordered for a quarter-past two.”

Lady Thurso pressed her fingers against her eyelids for a moment.

“I can’t remember,” she said. “Go to my room quickly, and bring me a large blue engagement-book—the one with ‘Where am I?’ written on it. And bring me anything—cold mutton or bread and cheese.”

She turned to Ruby.

“And I am so hungry!” she cried. “And it is exceedingly likely I shall have to fly off without any lunch. Oh, if I were only unemployed for two hours, I should spend one in eating! Besides, I had no breakfast, and is one egg in aspic sufficient for an active female until tea-time?”

Ruby laughed.

“It wouldn’t be for this one,” she said. “But why no breakfast? Is that a new plan?”

“New? No; it’s as old as the hills, for that delightful old Professor, the one like a pink bear at the British Museum, told me the other day——”

“Is he a hydrangea, too?” asked Jim.

“Not at all. When one goes out to lunch, he is the one person in the room whom everybody knows. Don’t interrupt. He told me that the ancient Egyptians never had any breakfast, because the word for breakfast is the same as afternoon, or something of the sort—and think how marvellous they were! I’ve been an ancient Egyptian for nearly a fortnight.”

“But they never had motor-cars,” said Jim. “It may have been that.”

“Oh, how flippant! How could we ever get anywhere without them, considering how frequently we don’t, even with them? Ah, now for the book!”

Catherine turned hurriedly over the pages of “Where am I?” and found where she was. She breathed a sigh of relief as she closed it again.

“Thank Heaven!” she said, “because otherwise I really shouldn’t have tasted food since yesterday until tea-time. Send the carriage back, please. It’s only the bazaar at St. Ursula’s, and I told them I almost certainly couldn’t go. Besides, the Princess is opening it, so I needn’t. I should only have to stand up and curtsey, and agree that the day is vile.”

“It isn’t,” said Jim.

“I know; but one can’t argue. Oh, the carriage must come back in twenty minutes,” she added to the footman.

Jim helped himself largely to the next course.

“Catherine, that is the first time you have ever disappointed me,” he said. “I thought you would always rather go somewhere and do something than sit down and be comfortable. I thought you never even wanted to be unemployed.”

“I don’t really,” said she. “I only think I do.”

“But, anyhow, you prefer to have lunch than go to St Ursula’s.”

“Ah, you don’t understand! I have got to be at the Industrial Sale at three, in order to open it myself, and I literally haven’t enough minutes to get down to St Ursula’s, and stand and grin, and get back to Portland Place by three. It couldn’t happen. My anxiety was that the quarter-past two engagement might leave me time, if I had no lunch, to get to Portland Place at three. It won’t. Hurrah!”

Lady Thurso poured herself out a glass of very hot water from a blanketed jug that stood at her elbow, and drank it in rapid sips. She never took alcohol in any form, except on those rare occasions when she was really dead beat, and had to do something energetic the next moment. But since every fad appealed to her, she, Athenian-wise, in her desire for some new thing, tried them all. She had just abandoned, in fact, the plan of drinking nothing whatever at meals, but sipping distilled water at eleven in the morning and half-past three in the afternoon. It seemed to suit her quite well, but as she was, and had always been, in perfect health already, there was nothing particular to be gained by it, whereas for other reasons the rÉgime was inconvenient, since at those hours when she ought to be sipping distilled water she was usually very busy, and either forgot, or, as at a bazaar, was so placed that distilled water was practically unattainable. So, just for the moment, she drank hot water at meals, and found it suited her as well as everything else.

“Good gracious, what nonsense people talk,” she said, “when they speak of the idle and luxurious upper classes! Look at us all. From the King downwards, we are worked to death for the sake of the classes who revile us. I stopped in the Park the other day to listen to one of those unwashed orators of the Marble Arch. He read out from a grimy newspaper that the King had been shooting somewhere, and was to return next day ‘in a motor-car,’ said the speaker, with unspeakable irony, and there were groans. Oh, how I longed to speak, too—but I hadn’t time—and remind them that he did a far longer day’s work than any two of them put together, and would come up in a motor-car because otherwise he couldn’t open the new wing of the Ophthalmic Hospital next morning. But that is just the weak point about Socialism. I am a Socialist until I hear them talk. Good gracious, how I should welcome an Eight-Hours Bill! It would be a holiday! Eight hours! Lazy brutes!”

Lady Thurso paused for a moment to eat the slice of cold mutton which she had ordered. Having been a disciple of Dr. Haig for several months in the past year, she had veered round, and now ate hardly anything but meat and pulses. She felt magnificently well.

“Not long ago, too, I saw an article in some Socialistic paper,” she said, “which struck me as exceedingly forcible, and I wrote to the author, asking him to come and see me at ten one morning, and booked the engagement when I heard from him. I was interested in what he said; I wanted to know what he went on. He came on the morning in question, but at half-past ten, and what was the reason, do you think? Because he had only just got up! He told me so himself. But I was anxious to do him justice, and said I supposed he had gone to bed very late the night before. Not at all; he had been in bed by twelve. And there was I, who had not gone to bed till four, expecting and waiting for this bedridden creature! And he had written about the indolence of me! Ah, that week I had felt strong Socialistic leanings, but he cured me at once. Thurso was so funny, too. He shuffled—you know Thurso’s shuffle of disapproval—when I told him about it. Why shouldn’t I have seen the man? I was interested, until I saw him, anyhow.”

Jim considered this. He was not a person of action, but liked inquiring into motive. It was this that made Catherine almost despair of getting him to marry Ruby; he could easily spend so many years in theoretical study of the advantages and drawbacks of matrimony.

“Is that sufficient?” he asked. “May one do anything that one finds interesting?”

“Certainly, if it doesn’t injure anybody. The first rule of life is to give other people a good time if you can; the second is not to hurt them under any pretext; and the third to enjoy yourself in every other way. That is why I adore what Thurso calls “quackery” of all kinds. I love discovering the secret of life which solves everything for about ten minutes. I have—what did the pink bear say?—oh yes: the most insatiable appetite for novelties. Wasn’t it darling of him? It keeps one busy, and that, after all, is the true elixir of life. I should be miserable if I hadn’t got more to do than I can possibly manage.”

“But just now you said you would give anything for a couple of unemployed hours this afternoon,” said Ruby.

“I know, because the flesh was weak, and I was very hungry and dog-tired. I feel better now—nearly ready to begin again.”

Ruby turned her pale Botticelli face towards her.

“How you can go on, I don’t know,” she said. “You play all the time we play, and work all the time we rest. You make me feel lazy too, which I resent.”

“Darling, I will make you feel industrious this afternoon,” said Catherine, “because I want you and Jim to stop here, and criticise and alter and direct till the ballroom and this room and the staircase are all absolutely perfect. You know what I want done: I want you to see that it is done. Don’t judge by daylight only. Have the blinds and curtains drawn, and see that it looks right by electric light. I shall not be able to get home till just before dinner, and then it will be too late. English decorators are hopeless; they know as much about decoration as I know about the lunar theory. I wonder they haven’t sent some plush monkeys climbing up into spiders’ webs to hang in the windows.”

“They sent hundreds of yellow calceolarias,” said Ruby, “which is about as bad. I sent them all back. And poor Mr. Hopkinson didn’t seem to know what wild-flowers were, when I told him you wanted wild-flowers all up the staircase.”

“He knows now,” remarked Lady Thurso.

It was probable that poor Mr. Hopkinson did “know now,” for ever since morning tall flowering grasses, meadow-sweet, cornflowers, cistus, ox-eye daisies, tendrils of wild-rose, clumps of buttercups, and all the myriad herbage of rural June, had been poured into the house, and the staircase, with great boughs of hawthorn and rose overhanging the lowlier growths, was like an apotheosised lane lying between ribands of shaded hayfield. Lady Thurso, inheriting the American love of doing something which has never been done before, a thing which leads to failure in a dozen cases, and hits the bull’s-eye on the lucky thirteenth, had never been better inspired, and the staircase, a rather heavy and not very admirable feature in the house, had been gloriously transformed by the lightness and spring of this feathery decoration. But poor Mr. Hopkinson’s ignorance of what wild-flowers were had been capped by his ignorance of how wild-flowers grew, and the original order to decorate the stairs with only wild-flowers had led to his placing the poor dears in neat and orderly rows, as in a riband bed. Consequently, he and his assistant florists had, about twelve-thirty that morning, to demolish and begin all over again, having first, under Lady Thurso’s supervision, “made a salad” of all these fragrant hampers of flowers and grasses, and then stuck them “properly”—that is to say, absolutely at random—into the trays of moist clay and troughs of water that lined each side of the staircase, which would keep them alive and bright-eyed till morning.

There was still five minutes before the carriage came, and Lady Thurso, “while the bread was yet in her mouth,” hurried out to see if Mr. Hopkinson had at length grasped the nature of her scheme. It appeared that he had. The staircase was a country lane, just as she had visualised it. And, somehow, with the adaptability that was as natural to her as is the sympathetic change of colour in a chameleon, as she stood below a clump of flowering hawthorn, she looked, for all her air of the world and patrician aspect, like some exquisite milkmaid, the embodiment of Queen Elizabeth’s ideal. But the milkmaid had the critical eye, and she looked very slowly and carefully up and down this vista of the hayfields.

She examined and re-examined.

“More buttercups in that corner,” she said—“all in a clump like sunlight—and another big bough of hawthorn—two boughs. Not twigs like that, just buttonholes, but boughs.”

She waited, sitting on the top step with Ruby, till this was done; then eagerly, but carefully, she looked at it again with her eyes half shut.

“I think it will do,” she said, “but please have all the curtains drawn, dear Ruby, and look at it by electric light. I’m not sure there is enough yellow even yet. I hope it won’t give Thurso hay-fever, for he and I will be planted here till the royal quadrille begins. He and Maud get here this afternoon.”

“And the typhoid?” asked Ruby.

“For the last week there has been no further case,” she said, “and everybody is getting better. No deaths for the last week, either. It looks as if it is all over. I was quite wrong, it seems, about the need of Thurso’s going there. It seems that he was of the utmost use in making the people obey doctors’ orders. I had not thought of that; it was stupid of me.”

This was completely characteristic of her. If she were wrong, she owned up at once. It spared one the degradation of arguing against one’s convictions.

“But I hope he will stop in town for the rest of the season,” she went on. “People already think it is odd of him to be in Scotland now; and though it matters very little what people think, it is much better that they should not think at all.”

“And Maud?” asked Ruby.

“It is from her I had all this news, though I have been writing—type-writing, I should say—to Thurso. Maud was interesting. She told me about a Mr. Cochrane, to whom Thurso let the fishing. He is a Christian Scientist, which sounds silly, but Maud says she saw him cure a bad case. She writes quite gravely, too, as if she really believed it, and she is not fanciful. I think I shall study Christian Science next August.”

“Why August?”

“Because I sha’n’t have any time in July. Oh yes, and Maud did not know that the fishing was let—so like Thurso not to tell her—and was caught by Mr. Cochrane poaching in his river. He wasn’t annoyed, it appears, though it certainly ought to have been annoying. Do you think I shall never be annoyed any more if I study Christian Science all August?”

“Oh, conceal your want of annoyance, then,” said Ruby, “and in any case don’t get the Christian Science smile. It wouldn’t suit you, and it is particularly fatiguing for others. Alice Yardly has it. That is why I can’t look at her any more.”

Lady Thurso was still not quite satisfied with her staircase, or, at any rate, she wanted to be sure that she was.

“Still more buttercups,” she proclaimed. “A hundred—two hands full of them.”

Then she detached herself again completely, and turned to Ruby.

“Oh, you must be just, Ruby,” she said. “Alice was always fatiguing, whether she smiled or not, and she is not really more fatiguing now than she used to be. Maud loves her, and so do I, and we both yawn our heads off when she is with us. It is true that she now seems to smile with a purpose, but if we didn’t know she was a Christian what’s-his-name, we shouldn’t notice the change. Her plan is to be helpful now, but she is just as helpless as ever, so it doesn’t matter. Of course, nobody can really help anybody else. We all have to help ourselves.”

“Then, why do you spend your life——” began Ruby.

“In bazaars and industries, you mean. I hardly know. I daresay you think it is insincere—that I ought to sell the diamond palisade and the ruby plaster, or induce Thurso to do so. But I am sincere. I want to live a gorgeous life, and I will. At the same time, I am delighted to work while you rest, as you said, if my work will make some poor wretches in Caithness a little less uncomfortable. If I didn’t, I should lie awake at night, thinking about them. That would be uncomfortable for me, too, so you are quite at liberty to suppose that it is all selfishness—refined selfishness, if you like, which is the worst sort. Certainly, if I wasn’t a very hard-working woman, which I am, I should have bad dreams by day, as well as no sleep at night.”

Again she paused.

“And I’ve been talking about myself,” she said, “which you will allow is unusual. And the carriage is here, and I must go. Ruby, you see the idea of the corner, don’t you? It must be sunlight—sunlight of buttercups, bless them! Oh, to be a milkmaid, now that June is here! But otherwise don’t let them touch the staircase any more. It is so nearly what I meant it to be that it is safer not to run any risks. It is darling of you to stop and superintend these stupid people. And please, if they bring any gardenia or tuberose, make them take it away, like the calceolarias. Gardenias are so ‘powerful.’ What a heavenly expression! I am sure it was invented at Clapham. The same people say ‘carriage sweep’ and ‘soiled handkerchiefs.’ I hate the middle classes!”

Lady Thurso would probably have been much surprised if she had been told that she was a genius, because she had a dim idea that, in order to be, or, rather, have been, a genius, it was necessary to live a sordid and unsuccessful life, and to die prematurely and unnoticed in a garret. But if the stock definition of genius was at all correct, she had a very reasonable claim to the title, for her power of taking pains bordered on the infinite. It made no matter to her on what she was engaged. Whatever she did, she approached her task with the transcendent aim for perfection, and whether it was the decoration of her staircase, or the speech that she had to make at the Industrial Sale, she bestowed on it the utmost effort of which she was capable. Another gift crowned this, which, though almost as rare, is not less remunerative; for when her utmost pains had been bestowed, she could dismiss the subject from her mind, and not worry about it any more. Thus now, the moment she had left her door, the staircase decoration ceased to exist for her. She had done her best, and her connection with it was severed. The speech, too, that she would have to make in a quarter of an hour was non-existent also, since this morning she had thought it over till she knew no more to think, had written it down, and had said it aloud to herself until she was perfectly satisfied that she knew what she wanted to say, and could say it.

This being so, she abandoned herself to the joy of looking about her—a fascinating pursuit, if one looks with intelligence. It was she, in fact, who was the author of a word that had gone round London—namely, that by driving for an hour at the right time and through the right streets you could, without exchanging a word with anybody, know all that the morning papers had contained of importance, and predict all that would be in the evening sheets. In the course of such a drive you could see the leader of what had been the Opposition and was now the Government stepping into a hansom, with a face elate but anxious, at his door in Grosvenor Square. The hansom argued a sudden emergency. There was no luggage, and the probable goal was Buckingham Palace. Who, then, was the new Prime Minister? Again, in Chesham Place you could see the Russian Ambassador getting into his motor, with luggage piled on the top. Clearly, then, he was going out of town, and an amelioration in Russian affairs might reasonably be argued, since it was impossible that he should leave if the crisis were as critical as it had been yesterday. Or, again, the blinds were down where A was very ill, the blinds were still up where B was yesterday supposed to be critically ill after an operation. Therefore, A had thought worse of it, and died; B had thought better of it, and still lived. Then there was a block at Hyde Park Corner, and the royal liveries flashed by. The new Prime Minister would only just get to Buckingham Palace first.

But much as she observed, it was probable that, as far as observation went, she was more the victim than the priest, for in all the little London world which is called the great there was no one at this moment quite so important as she. She “mattered”—a thing of rare occurrence in so republican a place—and she mattered publicly, openly, superbly. In the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of London life, in which nothing, neither beauty nor blood nor wit, nor any pre-eminence, carries with it any certain distinction, she was just now the centre of the whole astounding mixture of sordidness and brilliance, of intelligence and stupidity. To-morrow or next year, as she knew quite well, it might be a music-hall artist, or a foreign king, or a twopenny philosopher, or an infant prince, or somebody who played tunes on his front teeth, who would absorb general attention, but just now it was she. She rated “general attention” at about its proper value, knowing quite well that the affection of one friend was worth all the general attention of a century; but she found that it was, as she expressed it, “rather fun.”

The movements and conjunction of these stars and planets of London life are far more inscrutable than the vagaries of the simpler constellations of the heaven, but just at this moment Catherine Thurso was the central sun round which all else revolved. There were twenty other people who had wealth, beauty, and charm in no less degree than she, though in the matter of beauty forty-nine Parises out of fifty would have awarded the golden apple to this Juno among women, and the world, for that reason or another, had chosen her to be their temporary idol. She was the person who mattered, and this was her hour. And her hour, no less than her own enjoyment of it, she used, as Thurso had said, magnificently, for it really seemed as if charity, no less than social entertainment, would collapse without her support. She made herself a slave to any scheme that helped the helpless, or encouraged the would-be worker to work, and yet all the time she lived, and intended to live, gorgeously. So, like the driver of a pair of horses, she did not suffer the social horse to be lazy or shirk its work, for she knew (and acted on the knowledge) that her social distinction brought buyers to her bazaars. She played, therefore, the brilliant woman of the world for all it was worth, in order to assist deserving objects, though she enjoyed the rÔle enormously for its own sake. Both horses, charitable and social, felt her indefatigable lash, and she spurred herself on, just as she spurred on all those who surrounded her, inducing activity in them by the spectacle of her own glorious vitality.

Anyone as radically efficient as Catherine Thurso undoubtedly was has to march through life with as few impedimenta as possible, and all emotional baggage which is not likely to be needed must be firmly left behind. She had long ago realised this, and had always acted on it, so that now it was more from force of habit than by any conscious effort that she eliminated from her mind any emotion on its first appearance if it was likely to clog or hinder her energies. Worry, sorrow, regret for all that was past or irremediable, she simply threw away as one throws the envelopes of opened letters into the wastepaper basket. They were of no earthly use; they but made an unprofitable litter if they were allowed to lie about, nor did you want the drawers and compartments in your brain crammed with rubbish like this. Thus, it was but very seldom that she let her thoughts dwell on the one great thing that she had missed all her life. She had never loved. Her marriage with Thurso had, as the Press most truly announced, “been arranged,” and she had fallen in with this arrangement. Even as a girl she had wanted the sort of position and opportunity that such a marriage gave her, and she had made, certainly outwardly, and to a very considerable extent inwardly, the most splendid success of it. She had done her duty, too, as a wife in giving him three sons, and had filled her place superbly. But love had never really come to her. That, by no fault of hers, had apparently been left out of her emotional equipment, and since she was convinced that this omission was not her fault, and that it was out of her power to remedy it, she did not worry about it. But to-day, though she did not worry, she could not help wondering about a certain time now long past in her life, since it was conceivable that certain things which as yet belonged only to time long past would begin to be factors in her life in the immediate future. So now that the question of the staircase and the coming speech at the Industrial Sale were off her mind, these things occupied her somewhat insistently. There was no mystery about it all, and nothing whatever to fear either in the past or the future; but certain possibilities interested her.

Count Villars had just arrived in England, having at an extraordinarily early age—for he could be scarcely forty yet—been appointed Hungarian Ambassador to the Court of St. James; and there were quite a number of people resident in that parish who remembered very distinctly how desperately he had fallen in love with Catherine Thurso twelve years ago, when she had first come out, and, as her mother expressed it, taken “the shine” out of the rest of the girls of the year. Then, so the world still remembered, rather perplexing events had happened in rapid succession. Her engagement to young Villars had been actually supposed to have taken place, but hardly had that become news when it was contradicted, and Villars, then a junior secretary in the Embassy of which he was now the head, had been transferred elsewhere; while before the season was over Catherine Etheridge’s engagement to her present husband was formally announced, and was followed before the end of the year by her marriage. For Mrs. Etheridge had always meant that her daughter should marry Lord Raynham, as he then was; and if anybody thought that her plans were going to be interfered with by any volcanic young Austrian, however brilliant and handsome, without a penny of his own, and removed by half a dozen lives from the succession to the huge estates of Villars (those lives certainly made a lot of difference), she would show him his mistake. There were, in fact, many who thought that Mrs. Etheridge’s plans were going to be interfered with; but their mistake had been duly demonstrated to them when Catherine Etheridge so soon after became Catherine Raynham.

Rudolf Villars, in this long interval of twelve years between his abrupt departure and his return to England, had done everything except marry, and in all that he did Fortune had declared herself to be his parent. His really brilliant gifts had reaped their reward before he was too old to care about success, relations neither near nor dear had died, and he was now next in succession to the estates of Villars—with only a decrepit old great-uncle between him and them—and Ambassador to the English Court. To the world at large this situation, which just now was being rather largely discussed, had elements of interest. It was known that Catherine Thurso and her husband were not romantically attached to each other; it was conjectured that, since Rudolf Villars had remained single, he was still romantically attached to her, and it was impossible to help wondering whether at last she would show signs of being attached to anybody. To the world she was, in spite of her beauty, her charm, her brilliance, a somewhat irritating enigma. All the glory of her belonged to nobody. She did not care for her husband, which was a pity, but what made it worse was that she did not care for anybody else. And so many men had been wildly devoted to her, and of them all not one had met with a single particle of success, or, to do her justice, of encouragement, for she had nothing in common with the flirt. She was not in the least shocked, either, at their protestations. If she had been, her attitude would, at any rate, have been a moral and an intelligible one. But she merely laughed at them, and told them not to be absurd. If they persisted, she yawned. She forgot all about it, too, a week afterwards, even if she had been made to yawn very much, asked them to the house as usual, and was specially friendly.

Catherine Thurso, as will have been gathered, did her duty with exemplary fullness in the state of life to which her mother, in the main, had called her. As soon as she married she grasped the idea of life that her position entailed, if she was to fill it adequately and with any credit to herself; welcomed the prospect almost with rapture; and, with all the splendid energies of her mind and body, lived up to a really high ideal of it. Her time, her talents, and her money were always at the service of any scheme which she believed to be one that merited support, and she brought to her task not the sense of duty only, but a most warm-hearted kindliness. An unsupported sense of duty alone is a barren road to tread, but her genuine kindliness, her real interest in those who were in need, made it break out for her into flowers. She truly cared for the causes at which she so slaved; she wanted everybody to enjoy himself. But this warmth, this amiability, which pervaded her nature was both the strongest and the highest motive she knew. She did everything warmly, but nothing passionately, because it seemed as if passion had been left out of her nature. Yet sometimes, as on this afternoon, when the factors for years long past were coming up above the horizon again, she wondered whether that was quite strictly the case. It was years, certainly, since any hint or suggestion of it had come near her, but she remembered now that unquiet and perplexity, half bliss, half unhappiness, which she had known in those few weeks, and which had culminated in her half promise (it had not been more than that) to marry Rudolf Villars. Whatever that feeling was, it had been a bud only, something unopened, and had never expanded into a flower, for swift maternal hands had, without any figure of speech, nipped it off. She had been called a sentimental schoolgirl with such extraordinary assurance and acidity that she had felt that it must be the case.

But to-day, when she knew that this evening the man who had roused in her the sentimentality at any rate of a schoolgirl would, after this long lapse of years, come to her house again, she wondered (though this was useless emotional baggage) if she would feel anything that would show her that he had once been different to all others. She had not seen him since. Probably he was rather bald, rather stout, rather of the diplomatist type, which seemed to her often to be slightly tinged with pomposity. Very likely, when his name was announced, she would see a total stranger, shake hands with a stranger. She almost hoped that this would prove to be so.

Yes; she did not want to feel again anything which resembled the memory of that bewildering unrest, which, considering how long ago it all was, was so strangely vivid still. Her life was very full, she enjoyed it enormously; she was happy, she was nearly content, and she did not, as far as she knew herself, wish to risk agitation and upheaval in order to experience a new emotion. She had seen love, at the most, like distant lightning winking on the horizon; she did not want the thunderstorm to come any nearer. She wished it would go away.

Yet, yet ... even now, in the midsummer and zenith of her life, she sometimes asked herself, “Is this all?” And then, if she allowed herself to think further, it seemed to her a sorry comedy never to feel more acutely than she felt, never to be more absorbed, more eager, than this. Frankly, she did not believe in God, in any huge central force that was utterly good; and, that being denied her, she felt sometimes that it would have been something to believe in the devil. But she had never seen any reason to believe in him either. She had never been tempted to be wicked, as those moralists would say who believed in the devil. She was a woman healthy both in mind and body, with countless opportunities for doing good, of which she availed herself nobly, not because she believed in God, but because she was of a most kindly nature; and she was not what is called wicked, because she did not care sufficiently. Morality, perhaps it would be right to say, had no existence for her, and she was absolutely moral in thought and action because she had no real temptation to be otherwise. To her, as a married woman, it seemed also rather bad form to have a lover; it was not dignified. You had to play a mean part. But she realised that if only she had ever really cared for any of those men who certainly had “cared” for her, no moral code would have stood in her way for a moment. Simply she did not want, and she wondered whether the failure to want was strength or weakness.

The Industrial Sale went off with the success that always attended any scheme that she took up, and an hour after she had opened it most of the stalls were nearly empty, though the prices charged and paid for the objects sold were of the most fancy order. She herself had sold stockings, nothing but stockings, and all male London, it appeared, had been in dire want of stockings. They had been frightfully expensive, but the sense of her own cheapness in charging so much was counteracted by the knowledge of the good cause. Irish peasants had made them, and she willingly lent her place and position in order that Irish peasants might reap the benefits of what was adventitiously hers. She was sorry for people who had to live like that; she willingly gave her time, her energy, even her sense of “cheapness,” to help them.

But even before her stall was empty she had seen somebody in the crowd whom, though she had not seen him for so long, she recognised instantaneously. He was neither bald nor stout, nor did he look pompous. He was as she remembered him. And, again, though it had not come any nearer yet, the distant lightning flickered on the horizon.

Apparently, though he had only arrived in England two or three days ago, he had still more than two or three friends here, and for half an hour after she had seen him first he was occupied with hand-shakes and recognitions. Then, after her stall, which had been so besieged by purchasers, was bare, he passed and caught her eye.

“Ah, Lady Thurso,” he said, in that accurate foreign accent which she found now that she remembered so well, “a thousand greetings! I tried to get near your stall, but it was impossible. And I never waste time over the impossible. But now you have nothing that I can buy, so I, as a purchaser, am impossible too.”

“Yes, I have sold everything,” she said. “You are too late.”

She, who was generally so apt of speech, so quick to take up a point, or drop it for another, felt suddenly tongue-tied. She could think of nothing more to say, though, indeed, as she thought impatiently to herself, it was his turn. She had spoken last. For, as she stood there looking at him, finding him so utterly unchanged, in one moment twelve years had been softly sponged off her life, and some thrill, some nameless bitter-sweet agitation, flickered through her. She was no stranger to that feeling; she had felt it before. But for the moment, infinitesimal in duration, it tied her tongue. It was like some tune that we have heard in childhood, and suddenly hear again, so that we must pause and say to ourselves, “What is that?”

Then she partly recovered herself. If he would not speak, she must.

“Being late is almost a crime in a diplomatist,” she said. “You should always be a little earlier than other people.”

Then she pulled herself together, determining on her attitude towards him, and smiled.

“And your Excellency is going to honour my little dance this evening, are you not?” she said.

A faint smile answered hers, quivering for a moment on his clean-shaven mouth and being reflected in his dark eyes. “Your Excellency” was a delicious phrase, considering the last phrase before to-day that he had heard from that mouth. She—a woman’s privilege—had made a map, so to speak, of their future relations, colouring its boundaries as suited her. It amused him to pretend that he recognised the validity of them.

“I have already accepted your ladyship’s very kind invitation,” he said.