HAVE you dined at Ranelagh lately?” asked Norma Hardacre.

“I have never been there in my life,” replied Jimmie Padgate. “In fact,” he added simply, “I am not quite sure whether I know where it is.”

“Yours is the happier state. It is one of the dullest spots in a dull world.”

“Then why on earth do people go there?”

The enquiry was so genuine that Miss Hardacre relaxed her expression of handsome boredom and laughed.

“Because we are all like the muttons of Panurge,” she said. “Where one goes, all go. Why are we here to-night?”

“To enjoy ourselves. How could one do otherwise in Mrs. Deering's house?”

“You have known her a long time, I believe,” remarked Norma, taking the opportunity of directing the conversation to a non-contentious topic.

“Since she was in short frocks. She is a cousin of King's—that's the man who took you down to dinner—”

She nodded. “I have known Mr. King many weary ages.”

“And he has never told me about you!”

“Why should he?”

She looked him full in the face, with the stony calm of the fashionable young woman accustomed to take excellent care of herself. Her companion met her stare in whimsical confusion. Even so ingenuous a being as Jimmie Padgate could not tell a girl he had met for the first time that she was beautiful, adorable, and graced with divine qualities above all women, and that intimate acquaintance with her must be the startling glory of a lifetime.

“If I had known you for ages,” he replied prudently, “I should have mentioned your name to Morland King.”

“Are you such friends then?”

“Fast friends: we were at school together, and as I was a lonely little beggar I used to spend many of my holidays with his people. That is how I knew Mrs. Deering in short frocks.”

“It's odd, then, that I have n't met you about before,” said the girl, giving him a more scrutinising glance than she had hitherto troubled to bestow upon him. A second afterwards she felt that her remark might have been in the nature of an indiscretion, for her companion had not at all the air of a man moving in the smart world to which she belonged. His dress-suit was old and of lamentable cut; his shirt-cuffs were frayed; a little bone stud, threatening every moment to slip the button-hole, precariously secured his shirt-front. His thin, iron-grey hair was untidy; his moustache was ragged, innocent of wax or tongs or any of the adventitious aids to masculine adornment. His aspect gave the impression, if not of poverty, at least of narrow means and humble ways of life. Although he had sat next her at dinner, she had paid little attention to him, finding easier entertainment in her conversation with King on topics of common interest, than in possible argument with a strange man whom she heard discussing the functions of art and other such head-splitting matters with his right-hand neighbour. Indeed, her question about Ranelagh when she found him by her side, later, in the drawing-room was practically the first she had addressed to him with any show of interest.

She hastened to repair her maladroit observation by adding before he could reply,—

“That is rather an imbecile thing to say considering the millions of people in London. But one is apt to talk in an imbecile manner after a twelve hours' day of hard racket in the season. Don't you think so? One's stock of ideas gets used up, like the air at the end of a dance.”

“Not if you keep your soul properly ventilated,” he answered.

The words were, perhaps, not so arresting as the manner in which they were uttered. Norma Hardacre was startled. A little shutter in the back of her mind seemed to have flashed open for an elusive second, and revealed a prospect wide, generous, alive with free-blowing airs. Then all was dark again before she could realise the vision. She was disconcerted, and in a much more feminine way than was habitual with her she glanced at him again. This time she lost sight of the poor, untidy garments, and found a sudden interest in the man's kind, careworn face, and his eyes, wonderfully blue and bright, set far apart in the head, that seemed to look out on the world with a man's courage and a child's confidence. She was uncomfortably conscious of being in contact with a personality widely different from that of her usual masculine associates. This her training and habit of mind caused her to resent; despising the faint spiritual shock, she took refuge in flippancy.

“I fear our Tobin tubes get choked up in London,” she said with a little laugh. “Even if they did n't they are wretched things, which create draughts; so anyway our souls are free from chills. Look at that woman over there talking to Captain Orton—every one knows he's paymaster-general. A breath of fresh air in Mrs. Chance's soul would give it rheumatic fever.”

The abominable slander falling cynically from young lips brought a look of disapproval into Jimmie Padgate's eyes.

“Why do you say such things?” he asked. “You know you don't believe them.”

“I do believe them,” she replied defiantly. “Why shouldn't one believe the bad things one hears of one's neighbours? It's a vastly more entertaining faith than belief in their virtues. Virtue—being its own reward—is deadly stale to one's friends and unprofitable to oneself.”

“Cynicism seems cheap to-day,” said Jimmie, with a smile that redeemed his words from impertinence. “Won't you give me something of yourself a little more worth having?”

Norma, who was leaning back in her chair fanning herself languidly, suddenly bent forward, with curious animation in her cold face.

“I don't know who you are or what you are,” she exclaimed. “Why should you want more than the ordinary futilities of after-dinner talk?”

“Because one has only to look at you,” he replied, “to see that it must be very easy to get. You have beauty inside as well as outside, and everybody owes what is beautiful and good in them to their fellow-creatures.”

“I don't see why. According to you, women ought to go about like mediaeval saints.”

“Every woman is a saint in the depths of her heart,” said Jimmie.

“You are an astonishing person,” replied Norma.

The conversation ended there, for Morland King came up with Constance Deering: he florid, good-looking, perfectly groomed and dressed, the type of the commonplace, well-fed, affluent Briton; she a pretty, fragile butterfly of a woman. Jimmie rose and was led off to another part of the room by his hostess. King dropped into the chair Jimmie had vacated.

“I see you have been sampling my friend Jimmie Padgate. What do you make of him?”

“I have just told him he was an astonishing person,” said Norma.

“Dear old Jimmie! He's the best fellow in the world,” said King, laughing. “A bit Bohemian and eccentric—artists generally are—”

“Oh, he's an artist?” inquired Norma.

“He just manages to make a living by it, poor old chap! He has never come off, somehow.”

“Another neglected genius?”

“I don't know about that,” replied Morland King in a matter-of-fact way, not detecting the sneer in the girl's tone. “I don't think he's a great swell—I'm no judge, you know. But he has had a bad time. Anyway, he always comes up smiling. The more he gets knocked the more cheerful he seems to grow. I never met any one like him. The most generous, simple-minded beggar living.”

“He must be wonderful to make you enthusiastic,” said Norma.

“Look at him now, talking to the Chance woman as if she were an angel of light.”

Norma glanced across the room and smiled contemptuously.

“She seems to like it. She's preening herself as if the wings were already grown. Connie,” she called to her hostess, who was passing by, “why have you hidden Mr. Padgate from me all this time?”

The butterfly lady laughed. “He is too precious. I can only afford to give my friends a peep at him now and then. I want to keep him all to myself.”

She fluttered away. Norma leaned back and hid a yawn with her fan; then, rousing herself with an effort, made conversation with her companion. Presently another man came up and King retired.

“How is it getting on?” whispered Mrs. Deering.

“Oh, steady,” he replied with his hands in his pockets.

“Lucky man!”

Morland King shrugged his shoulders. “The only thing against it is papa and mamma—chiefly mamma. A Gorgon of a woman!”

“You'll never get a wife to do you more credit than Norma. With that face I wonder she is n't a duchess by now. There was a duke once, but a fair American eagle came and swooped him off under Norma's nose. You see, she's not the sort of girl to give a man much encouragement.”

“Oh, I can't stand a woman who throws herself at your head,” said King, emphatically.

“What a funny way men have nowadays of confessing to the tender passion!” said Mrs. Deering, laughing.

“What would you have a fellow do?” he asked. “Spout blank verse about the stars and things, like a Shakespearean hero?”

“It would be prettier, anyhow.”

“Well, if you will have it, I'm about as hard hit as a man ever was—there!”

“I 'm delighted to hear it,” said his cousin.

A short while afterwards the dinner-party broke up.

“I don't know whether you care to mix with utter worldlings like us, Mr. Padgate,” said Norma, as she bade him good-bye, “but we are always in on Tuesdays.”

“I'll tie him hand and foot and bring him,” said King. “Good-night, old chap. I'm giving Miss Hardacre a lift home in the brougham.”

Before Jimmie could say yes or no, they were gone. He found himself the last.

“You are certainly not going for another hour, Jimmie,” said Mrs. Deering, as he came forward to take leave. “You will sit in that chair and smoke and tell me all about yourself and make me feel good and pretty.”

“Very well,” he assented, laughing. “Turn me out when it's time for me to go.”

It had been the customary formula between them for many years; for Jimmie Padgate lacked the sense of time and kept eccentric hours, and although Connie Deering delighted in her rare confidential chats with him, a woman with a heavy morrow of engagements must go to bed at a reasonable period of the night. She was a woman in the middle thirties, a childless widow after a brief and almost forgotten married life, rich, pleasure-loving, in the inner circle of London society, and possessing the gayest, kindest, most charitable heart in the world. Her friendship with Norma Hardacre had been a thing of recent date.

She had cultivated it first on account of her cousin Morland King; she had ended in enthusiastic admiration.

“It is awfully good of you,” she said, when they were comfortably settled down to talk, “to waste your time with my unintelligent conversation.”

“There's no such thing as unintelligent conversation,” he declared.

“For a man like you there must be.”

“I could hold an intelligent conversation with a rabbit,” said Jimmie.

Norma Hardacre, on arriving home, entered the drawing-room, where her mother was reading a novel.

“Well?” said Mrs. Hardacre, looking up.

Norma threw her white silk cloak over the back of a chair.

“Connie sent her love to you.”

“Is that all you have to say?” asked her mother, sharply. She was a faded woman who had once possessed beauty of a cold, severe type; but the years had pinched and hardened her features, as they had pinched and hardened her heart. Her eyes were of that steel grey which the light of laughter seldom softens, and her smile was but a contraction of the muscles of the lips. Even this perfunctory tribute to politeness which had greeted Norma's entrance vanished at the second question.

“Morland King drove me home. What a difference there is between a private brougham and the beastly things we get from the livery-stable!”

“He has said nothing?”

“Of course not. I should have told you if he had.”

“Whose fault is it?”

Norma made a gesture of impatience. “My fault, if you like. I don't lay traps to catch him. I don't keep him dangling about me, and I don't flatter his vanities or make appeal to his senses, I suppose. I can't do it.”

“Don't behave like a fool, Norma,” said Mrs. Hardacre, rapping her book with a paper-knife. “You have got to marry him. You know you have. Your father and I are coming to the end of things. You ought to have married years ago, and when one thinks of the chances you have missed, it makes one mad. Here have we been pinching and scraping—”

“And borrowing and mortgaging,” Norma interjected.

“—to give you a brilliant position,” Mrs. Hardacre continued, unheeding the interruption, “and you cast all our efforts in our teeth. It's sheer ingratitude. Why you threw over Lord Wyniard I could never make out.”

“You seem to forget that, after all, there is a physical side to marriage,” said Norma, with a little shudder of disgust.

“I hate indelicacy in young girls,” said Mrs. Hardacre, freezingly. “One would think you had been brought up in a public house.”

“Then let us avoid indelicate subjects,” retorted Norma, opening the first book to her hand. “Where is papa?”

“Oh, how should I know?” said Mrs. Hardacre, irritably.

There was silence. Norma pretended to read, but her thoughts, away from the printed lines, caused her face to harden and her lips to curl scornfully. She had been used to such scenes with her mother ever since she had worn a long frock, and that was seven years ago, when she came out as a young beauty of eighteen. The story of financial embarrassment had lost its fine edge of persuasion by overtelling. She had almost ceased to believe in it, and the lingering grain of credence she put aside with the cynical feeling that it was no great concern of hers, so long as her usual round of life went on. She had two hundred a year of her own, all of which she spent in dress, so that in that one particular at least, if she chose to be economical, she was practically independent. Money for other wants was generally procurable, with or without unpleasant dunning of her parents. She lived very little in their home in Wiltshire, a beautiful and stately young woman of fashion being a decorative adjunct to smart country-house parties. In London, if she sighed for a more extensive establishment and a more luxurious style of living, it was what she always had done. She had hated the furnished house or flat and the livery-stable carriage ever since her first season. In the same way she had always considered the omission from her scheme of life of a yacht and a villa at Cannes and diamonds at discretion as a culpable oversight on the part of the Creator. But the sordid makeshift of existence to which she was condemned was not a matter of yesterday. In spite of the financial embarrassments of the maternal fable she had noticed no cutting down of customary expenditure. Her father still played the fool on the stock exchange, her mother still attired herself elaborately and disdained to eat otherwise than À la carte at expensive restaurants, and she, Norma, went whithersoever the smart set drifted her. She had nothing to do with the vulgarity of financial embarrassments.

As to the question of marriage she was as fully determined as her mother that she should make a brilliant match. She had had two or three disappointments—the unwary duke, for instance. On the other hand she had refused eligibles like Lord Wyniard out of sheer caprice.

The only man who had given her a moment's stir of the pulses, a moment's thought of throwing her cap over the windmills, was a young soldier in the Indian Staff Corps. But he belonged to her second season, before she had really seen the world and grasped the inner meaning of life. Besides, her mother had almost beaten her; and in an encounter between the dragon who guarded the gold of her daughter's affections and the young Siegfried, it was the hero that barely escaped destruction; he fled to India for his life. Norma lost all sight and count of him for three years. Then she heard that he had married a schoolfellow of hers and was a month-old father. It was with feelings of peculiar satisfaction and sense of deliverance that she sent her congratulations to him, her love to his wife, and a set of baby shoes to the child. She had cultivated by this time a helpful sardonic humour.

There was now Morland King, within reasonable distance of a proposal. Her experience detected the signs, although little of sentimentality had passed between them. He was young, as marrying men go—a year or two under forty—of good family, fairly good-looking, very well off, with a safe seat in Parliament being kept warm for him by a valetudinarian ever on the point of retirement. Norma meant to accept him. She contemplated the marriage as coldly and unemotionally as King contemplated the seat in Parliament. But through the corrupted tissue of her being ran one pure and virginal thread. She used no lures. She remained chastely aloof, the arts of seduction being temperamentally repugnant to her. Knowledge she had of good and evil (a euphemism, generally, for an exclusive acquaintance with the latter), and she was cynical enough in her disregard of concealment of her knowledge; but she revolted from using it to gain any advantage over a man. At this period of her life she set great store by herself, and though callously determined on marriage condescended with much disdain to be wooed. Her mother, bred in a hard school, was not subtle enough to perceive this antithesis. Hence the constant scenes of which Norma bitterly resented the vulgarity. “We pride ourselves on being women of the world, mother,” she said, “but that does n't prevent our remembering that we are gentlefolk.” Whereat, on one occasion, Mr. Hardacre, in his flustering, feeble way, had told Norma not to be rude to her mother, only to draw upon himself the vials of his wife's anger.

He came in now, during the silence that had fallen on the two women—a short, stout, red-faced man, with a bald head, and a weak chin, and a drooping foxy moustache turning grey. He was bursting with an interminable tale of scandal that he had picked up at his club—a respectable institution with an inner coterie of vapid, middle-aged dullards whose cackle was the terror of half London society. It is a superstition among good women that man is too noble a creature to descend to gossip. Ten minutes in the members' smoking-room of the Burlington Club would paralyse the most scandal-mongering tabby of Bath, Cheltenham, or Tunbridge Wells.

“We were sure she was a wrong 'un from the first,” he explained in a thick, jerky voice to his listless auditors. “And now it turns out that she was in thick with poor Billy Withers, you know, and when Billy broke his neck—that was through another blessed woman—I'll tell you all about her by'm bye—when Billy broke his neck, his confounded valet got hold of Mrs. Jack's letters, and how she paid for 'em's the cream of the story—”

“We need not have that now, Benjamin,” said Mrs. Hardacre, with a warning indication that reverence was due to the young.

“Well, of course that's the end of it,” replied Mr. Hardacre, in some confusion.

But Norma rose with a laugh of hard mockery.

“The valet entered the service of Lord Wyniard, and now there's a pretty little divorce case in the air, with Jack Dugdale as petitioner and Lord Wyniard as corespondent. Are n't you sorry, mother, I did n't marry Wyniard and reform him, and save society this terrible scandal?”

Turning from her disconcerted parents, Norma pulled back the thick curtains from the French window and opened one of the doors.

“What are you doing that for?” cried Mrs. Hardacre irritably, as the cold air of a wet May night swept through the room.

“I'm going to try to ventilate my soul,” said Norma, stepping on to the balcony.