“I am very thirsty, Eva.” Lady Carey had just come in from her drive, after having much enjoyed, as well as admired, the new system of be-your-own-policeman. She was not lacking in the power of observation, and could very well appreciate the rational side of London’s new mode of life; although she would sooner have perished than owned to anyone her thoughts on the subject.

“Let me pour you a cup of tea, mother,” replied Eva, as she went to the tea table. “I forgot to tell you that Gwen had returned to town. I saw her this morning at the dining-halls and she struck me as being more beautiful than ever.”

“Gwen used to be a very smart girl,” sneeringly remarked Lady Carey, as she took the cup handed to her.

“I mean that her expression is more ethereal than ever, mother. She gives one the impression that a radiant vision has been revealed to her.”

“My dear girl—she looked—on Lionel! and he is no mean creature.” Lady Carey gave vent to her suppressed mirth. “When did they return from their—what d’ye call it—moral spring cleaning?”

“Mother, how can you be so irreverent? Do you not think it very sensible of them to run away from the crowd, and hide their bliss in the wilderness?”

“No, I call it decidedly vulgar.”

“But when you married, did you not send all your social duties to Jericho? You must have longed for solitude with the man you loved.”

“Not at all, my dear; there was plenty of time for all that when we went to Italy after the wedding. Besides, we did not mention these things in my time; one did what everyone else did, it was neither painful nor exhilarating, it was the custom, and one thought no more of it. But there is something clownish in running away anyhow, and Heaven knows where, as these two have done.”

“Gwen says they were supremely happy staying with two cottagers.”

“Labourers! The girl must be demented. I could pass over their evading the religious ceremony; I am not bigoted, and pride myself on being large-minded; but when the flower of our aristocracy behave like shoe-blacks, I do think it is time to cry out. I cannot forgive them their want of good taste, and am inclined to believe they do it for effect.”

“Oh, dear! no, mother. They believe intensely in the reform of Society.”

“Such strong opinions are unseemly; and it is hardly the thing to take such a serious step in life, without advising your friends and acquaintances.”

“I do not see what Society has to do with private life,” answered Eva, who was standing at the foot of her mother’s couch.

“My dear child, it is downright anarchism! Where is the moral restraint that keeps us all in order! We may frown at dull, old Mrs Grundy; but no well-organised Society can very well do without her, after all.”

“Oh! Mrs Grundy died from the shock of seeing herself in nature’s garb. She was only a soured old schoolmistress, who each morning glanced at the columns of her Court Journal with suspicious eyes. She ran down the names of births, marriages and deaths, chuckling inwardly at the comforting feeling that all her social infants were well under her thumb, and that none had escaped her lynx eye.”

“I hear a ring at the bell,” suddenly interrupted Lady Carey.

“Do you expect anyone, mother dear?”

“Not anyone, dear child. But it is Thursday, and that used to be my day at home.” The dainty woman sighed heavily.

“I think I hear Lionel’s voice in the hall.” Eva turned towards the door as it was opened to let in Lady Somerville and her husband.

“I am glad to see you, Gwen”—Lady Carey rose to kiss the Countess. “Well, Lionel,” as she resumed her seat on the couch, “I am ashamed of you. What on earth possessed you to carry her off in that wild fashion? You know, my dear boy, a good many centuries have passed since Adam and Eve, and I have no doubt that the Almighty Himself would consider their conduct improper.”

“You are the same as ever, Lady Carey, as lighthearted as of yore.”

“You surely did not expect me to change my views, did you, dear Lionel? You are too funny for words! But I suppose that is your privilege. You always do whatever you like and are accepted wholesale by the rest of the world. Luckily nothing can alter the fact that you are a gentleman.”

“Oh! for goodness’ sake strike out that word from your vocabulary!” hotly exclaimed Lionel. “It means absolutely nothing but impunity to do every disgraceful action under the sun.”

“I beg your pardon, my dear Lionel, the word means everything. A bad action committed by a gentleman is very different from one committed by a plebeian; the first knows what he is about, and whatever he does, he never forgets that he is born a gentleman.”

“The more shame to him for not behaving like one,” muttered Lionel.

“Oh! dear boy, you are too radical, indeed. Well, tell me, had you many sins to confess? Had Gwen a heap of peccadilloes on her conscience?”

Lionel smiled, but remained silent.

“Oh! oh! are they so appalling that my matronly ear cannot hear them? Fie on you both!” and Lady Carey looked very arch.

“These are mysteries that we have tried to solve alone.”

“Where has your sense of humour gone to, my poor fellow? But, never mind, forgive my importunate questions; you don’t know how ghastly dull life has become. Everything is so uniform, the days so long, the amusements so scarce; and what dreadful plays your new stage Society is producing! Oh! my dear boy, it is too awful. Still, one must go to them, or else we should all be left out in the cold, and Society would crumble away.”

“And you really believe that Society does exist?” sententiously questioned Danford, as he entered the room and bowed to the hostess. “There is nothing so pernicious as delusions, Lady Carey; Society is a huge spectrum reflecting all sorts of coloured shapes, which appear to each one perfect in contour. No one ever thinks of striking the lens, because they each of them have seen their own likeness reflected in it, and believe in its reality. But the reality is only the semblance of reality; strike the lens, and the likeness will suddenly appear out of proportion; and when broken to atoms, the whole phantasmagoria will vanish, leaving the real substance untouched. You have lived under the delusion that the social phantom was substantial; you must admit now that it was a deity created by man.”

“It would not exist any longer were we to give up playing our part in the tournament; but there is still life in the old British lion, Mr Danford. Do take a cup of tea.”

“A Society in which members do not know each other, even by sight, has not many chances of leading the game.”

“Don’t you find, Mr Danford, that we are making progress in what you call the science of observation?” inquired Lady Carey.

“It is difficult to tell, Lady Carey. I do not find that we always deal with conscientious pupils. Observation can be developed in time; but it is the lack of memory that is so disastrous. Mrs Webster, for instance, cannot remember more than half-a-dozen faces.”

“Dear me, my dear guide, I do not wish to remember more than that number at present.”

“Ah! but Mrs Webster is not exclusive, and she had to give up having a reception the other day, because her guide had sprained his ankle. Mind you, Mrs Webster is sincere, she wishes to improve in the art; but other pupils are more puzzling, as, for instance, the vain people, who make hopeless blunders, and insist on telling you they know quite well who’s who, but they are having you on; this makes our work most trying.”

No sooner had Danford spoken these words, than the door was thrown open, and Montagu Vane and Sinclair entered. Lady Carey smiled on them and offered her right hand to be kissed.

“How delightful it is to know that there are a few—alas! a very few—salons where one can go and have a chat.”

The little Apollo tripped across the room to greet Gwen and Lionel.

“My dear Mr Vane, I am afraid I am the only one here who can sympathise with you.”

“If we do not strongly oppose this vulgarising view of life, art will totally disappear from our social circles,” remarked Sinclair, as he sat down on a small settee beside Eva.

“Yes,” echoed Vane, “I am doing my level best to devise some means of checking this downfall of art. I suggested to Lord Mowbray this morning that we should invent a sort of artificial vestment. This is my plan. Each one would carry round his neck, wrist or waist, a small electric battery, which would throw a lovely colour all over one’s body, which would at least adorn, if it could not conceal it.”

“What a strange thing that we should, in a London drawing-room, openly discuss this question of nudity, when a few weeks ago no respectable person would have admitted the existence of shirt or trousers,” laughingly remarked Lady Carey.

“Ah! that was the British cant!” retorted Lionel. “Let us hail the storm which knocked that false modesty out of us all.”

“My dear Lady Carey,” resumed Vane, “it is not a question of decency at present, but a matter of artistic feeling. I should propose organising the thing in this way: Dukes would have a red colour thrown over their lordly forms; Earls and Barons a blue shade; Baronets, yellow; commoners would have no colour, but the members of the Royal Family would have red and yellow stripes. Ladies would naturally have their shades too, according to their rank: Duchesses, pink; Countesses, pale green; and so on. This is a rough sketch of course.”

“I quite see what you mean, Mr Vane,” remarked Danford; a sort of mirage peerage.

Montagu Vane glanced up at the remark, and curtly replied, “It would at all events acquaint the public with the social standing of the person whom he elbowed in the street, and differentiate a peer of the realm from a—social guide.”

“Or a—dilettante,” mischievously added Danford.

“I should have thought that what was more important than finding out in what way one man was differentiated from another, was to discover the points in which they were alike,” said Lionel. “You are catching at a straw, my dear Montagu; your system is shallow, and you will never persuade the Upper Ten of its practicableness. For my part, I plainly refuse to envelop my carcass with a Loie Fuller’s sidelight.”

“Your decision is law amongst your peers, my lord,” and Danford bowed.

“We had better start a Society for the obtaining of accurately reported news. Newspapers have disappeared, and with them the necessity has died out for falsifying the truth,” said Lionel.

“I do protest,” interrupted Sinclair, “against plain facts being handed to me by unimaginative people who pass on an ungarnished piece of news without as much as adding one poor little adjective. It is too brutally literal.”

“It all comes, as I was saying,” apologetically remarked Vane, “from a complete lack of artistic feeling.”

“There you are right,” hurriedly said Lionel; “for Parliament is broken up from the lack of dramatic power in its members, and militarism will inevitably die out with the disappearance of military distinctions.”

“And dramatic art is buried since the study of local colour and environment has been abandoned,” sharply added Vane.

“Yes,” sadly echoed Lady Carey, “imagination has been insulted by some terrible creature called Nature.”

“Dear Lady Carey,” suavely murmured the little dilettante, “we can thank God that we have still a few salons—though, alas! a very few—where we can bask in the sunshine of gossip.” Then turning to Lionel, “But do not let me deter you from your plan; and pray telephone to me whenever you want my house for your new Society. I consider it a duty to keep en evidence; if we cannot prevent your reforms, we can at least patronise them, for when Society ceases to lead, it will disappear.”

“You are speaking words of the greatest wisdom, Mr Vane,” said Danford, “words which make me think deeply. You could indeed do a great deal for the sake of Society, by urging upon members of the Royal Family that it is in their power to prevent the annihilation of their house.”

“In what way can I do this?” Vane turned towards the little artist; in an instant he seemed to have forgotten his grievance against the tribe of buffoons.

“Well, Mr Vane, the illness of Mrs Webster’s guide made me ponder these grave questions, and I discussed the point with the Committee of Social Guides. We all know what a gift Royal Princes possess for remembering faces; therefore we have come to the conclusion that such a talent should not be wasted. Someone must discreetly approach our Royal Highnesses, and beg of them to allow their names to be added to the list of social guides. You will no doubt agree with me that this is the only way in which our Royal Family can be made useful, for since the storm, nothing has been heard of them, and no one seems to know what they are up to.”

“The suggestion is not a bad one, Mr Danford,” slowly answered Vane. “We all know how eager our Princes are to meet every wish of their subjects.”

“Yes, this is indeed true,” added Lady Carey, “and Society might then recover some of its prestige.”

“I do not know whether these illustrious guides will have any sidelights to throw on life’s problems, or any philosophical aperÇu on human beings; but those who will employ them will be sure, at any rate, of an infallible guide to the finding of a person’s identity, and of an accurate knowledge of the Peerage which would put a Debrett to shame. Although I myself believe that since the disappearance of garments, the public has become eager to know that which lies concealed within the inner heart of men and women.”

“This idea of Royal Guides is sure to take like wild-fire amongst the American millionaires,” broke in Lionel.

“There you are right,” briskly retorted Vane, “but that reminds me that we have not seen anything of the fashionable Yankees.”

“I can tell you about them, Mr Vane,” mysteriously answered the little buffoon. “They are meditating; and although you do not notice their presence, still they are at large; but the mot d’ordre has been given to all the guides never to disclose the identity of the United States’ citizens until they give us leave.”

“How lonely it must be for them to remain in that isolation,” remarked Lady Carey.

“Not a bit of it,” replied Lionel; “they are quite able to entertain each other. It is we who are the losers, not they, for the invasion of American heiresses upon our Piccadilly shores has vivified our rotten old Society. Lord Petersham used to remark that our girls looked like drowned mermaids at the end of the season, whilst an American maiden was as fresh at Goodwood as she had been at the Private View.”

“Quite true,” said Sinclair, “the American girl is cute, not blasÉ.”

“Yes,” broke in Lady Carey, “she came over here to have a good time and carried that creed up to the last.”

“They invariably aim straight and high,” continued Lionel, “and the Americans will be the first to attach Royal Guides to their households.”

“I wonder which of our Royal Princes Mrs Pottinger will choose?” said Lady Carey, bursting out laughing. “I cannot help roaring when I think of the vulgar woman entertaining us all in her palace. There she was on deck, full sail and long-winded; for hours she would hold forth on English politics, Christian science, European hotels, with that rhythmical monotony so peculiar to her race.”

“That is just why they will carry the day, if you do not look out,” wistfully remarked Danford; “their memory is always ready to help their fluency.”

“The conversation of an American,” said Sinclair, “resembles a sermon without a text, an address minus the vote of thanks.”

“You know what she called London Society?” inquired Lord Somerville. “She named it her buck-jumper; but she was bent on mastering it, although it kicked and reared as she forced her gilded spurs into its flanks. At times the incongruity of the buck-jumper fairly puzzled her. One thing she could not swallow, that was Society’s meanness. You know what she said to the Duke of Salttown? ‘That England was the country for cheap kindness and expensive frauds.’”

“Ha! ha! ha!” they all laughed.

“Wonderful race!” exclaimed Sinclair, “whether it is the President of the United States, a cowboy, or a fashionable woman, they are all gifted with that intuition which divines ‘friend’ or ‘foe’ in each face they meet; just as the red Indian measures distance with his far-seeing eye, and discovers a white spot on the horizon which is likely to develop into a blizzard. In everything they undertake, they first see the aim, go for it, win it, and sit down afterwards without a flush or a puff.”

“Perhaps America is destined to shape our future civilisation,” said Lady Carey; “I am sure I do not care who is to be our saviour, as long as we are saved from this anarchy.”

“My dear Lady Carey,” replied Lord Somerville, as he walked to the chimney and leaned his elbow on the marble mantelpiece, “we shall have to coin another word for the future Society that is staring us in the face, for the old word civilisation has a nasty flavour about it. At times we have worn war-paint and feathers; at others, charms round our necks, crosses on our hearts, decorations on our breasts; but the cruelty of the savage was no more execrable than the dogmatic ferocity of Torquemada, nor in any way more inhuman than the ruthlessness of George I. Nor was Queen Eleanor’s kerchief more indicative of mediÆval depravity than Queen Elizabeth’s frill an emblem of Renaissance levity. Each of these historical eras was but a different stage of barbarism. We had more ornaments than Hottentots, and less principles than monkeys. As long as we have two different creeds, half-a-dozen codes of honour, and hundreds of punctilios, we shall never be civilised. Instead of adding more labels to human beings, we must, first of all, find out what a human being is. We are taught virtue in the nursery, but we are compelled to commit crimes when out of it. The morning prayer says one thing, and life as we make it teaches another. Step by step we are trained to family deceit, political Pharisaism, commercial fraud, diplomatic mendacity, art quackery; and all that in the name of a Redeemer who lashed the vendors out of the temple, and died for the love of truth and peace.”

“Someone said that it needed three generations to make a gentleman,” murmured Vane in his silvery voice.

“No doubt the dogmatist who said that must have thought of Poole and La Ferriere as the modern Debretts; for our present aristocracy is nothing more than a nobility of vestments. Generation after generation has handed down to us the art of carrying the soldier’s sword, the judge’s robes, the Court train, or of bearing a proud head under the Prince of Wales’s nodding plumes. It is the atavism of garment which has made us what we are. But in the race of life; in the fight for the post of honour; in the hour of darkness and sorrow, when failure brings down the curtain on our lives, clothes will be of no help. The noble sweep of a satin train, the long-inherited art of bowing oneself out of a room, will be of little service in the final bowing out into eternity. Your grandmother’s corselet or your great-grandfather’s rapier and jerkin will lie idly on the ground, for we are not allowed any luggage on the other side. The real fact is that the whole social structure was a big farce.”

“A farce more likely to turn into a tragedy,” saucily retorted Vane. “See how matters are going on in South Africa; or at least see what is not going on; for by this time we must be the laughing-stock of a handful of farmers. War is bound to cease, and we shall have to retreat ignominiously, as we cannot send any more men out there, owing to the confusion at the War Office. It appears they cannot distinguish our valiant officers from the men.”

“Ah! This is the first blow struck at the principle of warfare,” replied Lionel. “When you think of it in cold blood, it is quite impossible to admit of war. Try and boycott your neighbour, persuade him into giving up his will to yours; order his meals, eat three parts of them yourself, invade his house, break his furniture; and if he in any way objects, then use the convincing arguments of artillery and bayonets. After that, you will see how it works.”

“Yes, the history of nations is nothing else but a series of thefts, murders and duplicity; and were any of our personal friends to commit a quarter of what sovereigns and governments commit in one day’s work, we should promptly strike their names off our visiting list,” said Gwendolen. Perhaps this remark struck home, for no one replied. Vane got up briskly on to his feet, and bowed daintily over Lady Carey’s hand.

“Ta-ta, Mr Danford,” he nodded to the little mimic, and left the room.

“I shall walk a little way with you, Lionel,” said Sinclair, who had got up to say good-bye to his hostess.

“Come along with us,” replied Lionel. “Good-bye, dear Lady Carey. I am going to ring up old Victor de Laumel by telephone, and ask him what they think of us in ‘la ville lumiÈre.’”

“My dear boy,” said Lady Carey, “you may be sure of this, that the smart Parisians would have found a way out of this difficulty before now. But at any rate, they never would have taken it au serieux, as you are doing; for they are too punctilious on the question of good taste, and more than anything fear ridicule!”