On a vast Chesterfield, every unoccupied square inch of which seemed to bulge with indignant pride, Mrs. Delarayne reclined in picturesque repose. Her small feet, looking if possible more dainty than usual in their spruce patent leather shoes, were resting on a rich silk cushion whose glistening gold tassels lay heavily amid all the crushed splendour of the couch. Other cushions, equally purse-proud and brazen, supported the more important portions of the lady's frame, and a deep floorward curve in the line of the Chesterfield conveyed the impression that, however tenderly Mrs. Delarayne might wish to be embraced by her furniture and its wedges of down, she was at all events a creature of substantial proportions and construction.

The picture presented was one of careless and secure opulence.

The contents of the room in which Mrs. Delarayne rested had obviously been designed and produced by human effort of the most conscientious and loving kind. All the objects about her were treasures either of art or antiquity, or both, and stood there as evidence of the power which their present owner, or her ancestors, must have been able to exercise over hundreds of gifted painters, cabinet-makers, needlewomen, potters, braziers, carvers, metal-workers, and craftsmen of all kinds for generations.

It was late in June in the ninth year of King Edward VII's reign—that halcyon period when nobody who was anybody felt particularly happy, because no such person had actually experienced what unhappiness was. Certainly Mrs. Delarayne had not, unless she had shown really exceptional fortitude and self-control over her husband's death.

A sound in the room suddenly made her turn her head, and she dropped her book gently into the folds of her dress.

"My dear child," she exclaimed, addressing her elder daughter, "are you still there? I thought you had gone long ago! I must have been asleep."

"You did sleep, Edith dear," her daughter replied, "because I heard you snoring. You only picked up your book a moment ago."

Mrs. Delarayne examined her own blue-veined knotty hands with the expression of one who is contemplating a phenomenon that is threatening to become a nuisance, and then dropping them quickly out of sight again, she glanced eagerly round the room as if she wished to forget all about them. She did not relish her daughter's allusion to her snoring,—another sign of the same depressing kind as her blue-veined knotty hands,—and her next remark was made with what seemed unnecessary anger.

"Instead of wasting your time here, Cleo," she observed, picking up her book again, "why don't you go upstairs and pull some of those nasty black hairs off your upper lip? You know who's coming to-day, and you also know that young men, in this country at any rate, strongly object to any signs of temperament in a girl. They think it incompatible with their ideal of the angel, or the fairy, or some other nonsense."

Cleopatra rose, jerked her shoulders impatiently, and snorted.

"I should have thought it better to be natural," she blurted out. "If it's natural for me to have dark hairs on my upper lip, then surely I should not remove them."

Again Mrs. Delarayne dropped her book and glanced round very angrily. "Don't be stupid, Cleo!" she cried. "What do you suppose 'natural' means nowadays? Has it any meaning at all? Is it natural for you to blow your nose in a lace handkerchief? Is it natural for you to do your hair up? Is it natural for you to eat marrons glacÉs as you do at the rate of a pound and a half a week,—yes, a pound and a half a week; I buy them so I ought to know, unless the servants get at them—when you ought to be living in a cave, dressed in bearskins and gnawing at the roots of trees? Don't talk to me about 'natural.' Nothing is natural nowadays, except perhaps the inexhaustible stupidity of people who choke over a little process of beautification and yet swallow the whole complicated artificiality of modern life."

As Mrs. Delarayne turned her refined and still very beautiful face to the light, it became clear that she at any rate did not choke over any "little process of beautification"; for she was at least fifty-five years of age, and at a distance of two or three yards, looked thirty.

Cleopatra moved mutinously towards the door.

"That's right, my dear," said her mother in more conciliatory tones. "I don't mind your upper lip; I like it. But then I understand. Denis does not understand, and I'm convinced that he doesn't like it."

Flushing slightly, Cleopatra turned to face her mother. "Edith dear, how can you talk such nonsense!" she exclaimed. "What do I care whether Denis likes it or not?"

Mrs. Delarayne smiled. "Well, I do, my dear. When you are my age you'll be as anxious as I am to get your daughters married."

The younger woman turned her head. "Married!" she cried. "Oh when shall I hear the end of that litany! I suppose you want me to marry anybody, it doesn't matter whom, so long as I——"

"H'm," grunted the parent. "I don't think the discussion of that particular point would prove profitable."

Cleopatra sailed haughtily out of the room, and there was just the suggestion of an angry slam in the way she closed the door after her.

She was now twenty-five years of age. "Much too old," was the mother's comment. "It must be this year or never." She was a good-looking girl, dark, with large intelligent eyes, a pretty, straight nose, and full well-shaped lips. About five foot six in height, she was also well developed. Certainly her colouring was not quite all that it might have been; but she was naturally a little anÆmic, as all decent girls should be who, at twenty-five years of age, are still unmarried. "It seems absurd," thought her mother, "that such a creature should have had to wait so long." And then with an effort she turned her thoughts to less depressing matters.

Mrs. Delarayne was a widow. Her late husband, a wealthy, retired Canadian lawyer, had been dead four years, having left her in her fifty-first year very comfortably off with two attractive daughters. She had inherited everything he possessed, including two handsome establishments, the one in Kensington and the other at Brineweald, Kent,—and in his will there had not been even a small special provision for either of his children. Economically, therefore, Cleopatra and Leonetta Delarayne were bound hand and foot to their mother. But although Mrs. Delarayne was by no means averse to power, she wielded it so delicately in her relations with her offspring, that after their father's death neither of her daughters ever learnt to doubt that what was "Edith's" was theirs also. In regard to one question alone did Mrs. Delarayne ever lay her hands significantly upon her gold bags—and that was marriage. She never concealed from them that she would be liberal to the point of recklessness if they married, but that she would draw in her purse-strings very tightly, indeed, if they remained spinsters. In fact it was understood that when she died each of her daughters, if wed, would inherit half her wealth, but if they remained old maids, the bulk of it would most certainly go to some promising though impecunious young man in her circle.

She professed to loathe the sight, so common alas! in England, of the affluent spinster, "growing pointlessly rotund on rich food at one of the smug hotels or boarding-houses for parasitic nonentities, which are distributed so plentifully all over the land," while thousands of promising young men had to wait too long before they were able to take their bride to the altar. It was her view that this feature of social life in England was truly the white man's burden, and she vowed that no money of hers would ever help to produce so nauseating a spectacle. Behind Mrs. Delarayne's laudable views on this subject, however, there were doubtless other and less patriotic considerations, which may or may not be revealed in the course of this story.

A few minutes later the maid entered the room and announced, "Sir Joseph Bullion."

"Show him in," cried her mistress, throwing her legs smartly off the Chesterfield, adjusting her dress with a few swift touches, and then reclining limply amid the cushions in a manner suggesting extreme feebleness and fatigue.

The maid reappeared and ushered in a very much over-dressed old gentleman.

He stood for some seconds on the threshold, smiling engagingly into the room. It was difficult to refrain from the thought that his affability was largely the outcome of entire self-satisfaction; for as he posed in the full light of the window, there was that about his attitude and expression which seemed to invite and defy the most searching inspection. Nor did his eyes smile with true kindliness, but rather with the conscious triumph of the attractive dÉbutante.

Mrs. Delarayne quietly noticed all these familiar traits in her friend, and responded in the expected manner with one or two idle compliments that afforded him infinite satisfaction.

"No, sit here beside me," she whispered, as if every effort to speak might prove too much for her.

Sir Joseph did as he was bid, lingered tenderly over the handshake, and gazed with strained sympathy into his companion's healthy face.

"Younger than ever!" he exclaimed, "but not very well I fear."

He was accustomed to Mrs. Delarayne's occasional affectation of valetudinarian peevishness, alleged ill-health as a fact. As a rule it was the prelude to the request for a favour on a grand scale, and being a man of very great wealth, and therefore somewhat tight-fisted, he was always rendered unusually solemn by his friend's fits of indisposition.

They chatted idly for a while; Mrs. Delarayne gradually receding from the position of one on the verge of a dangerous malady, to that of a person merely threatened with a serious breakdown if her worries were not immediately made to cease.

It was a strange relationship that united these two people. Although Sir Joseph was not more than five years the lady's senior, she always treated him as if he belonged to a previous geological period; and he, chivalrously shouldering the burden of Æons, had acquired the courteous habit of opening all his anecdotal pronouncements with such words as: "You would not remember old so-and-so," or "You cannot be expected to remember the days when";—a formality which, while it delighted Mrs. Delarayne, convinced her more and more that although Sir Joseph might make an excellent ancestor, it would have been an indignity for a woman of her years to accept him as a lover.

Sir Joseph had already been married once, and it had been the mistake of his life. Before he could have had the shadow of a suspicion that he was even to be an immensely wealthy man, he had, out of sentiment, taken a woman of his own class whom he had found somewhere in the Midlands. With her decease Sir Joseph, who was rapidly becoming a substantial and important member of society, hoped that his lowly past had died also; and when from the window of the first coach he watched the hearse bearing his wife swing round through the gates of the cemetery, he mentally recorded the resolution that on that day all uncertain syntax, all abuse and neglect of aspirates, and all Midland slang should be banished from his house for ever. He had loved his wife, but he frankly acknowledged to his soul that her death had been opportune; and as her coffin was lowered into the grave, he could not help muttering the thought, "Here also lies Bad Grammar. R.I.P."

Now compared with the late Mrs. Bullion, Mrs. Delarayne seemed to Sir Joseph a paragon of brilliance. She had dazzled him from the moment of their first meeting, and she continued to do so without effort, or, it must be admitted, without malicious intent either. Here was a woman who could be an honour to a wealthy man, who could gratify his lust for display, and carry the convincing proofs of his great wealth right under the noses of the very best people, without ever provoking the usual comments of the spiteful and the envious. She was a creature, moreover, with a large circle of influential and distinguished friends, and she possessed that inimitable calmness of bearing in their company, beside which Sir Joseph's mental picture of the first Mrs. Bullion partook of the mobility of a cinematograph or of a Catherine wheel in full action.

Mrs. Delarayne on the other hand had, as we have already seen, tutored herself into regarding Sir Joseph simply as a venerable old relic. In her fifty-fifth year this brave lady held very decided views about youth and age, and was very far from admitting that a man five years her senior was the only possible match for her. Indeed it was only the presence of her daughters that for some time past had prevented her from seriously contemplating and arranging a very different kind of match. Since their father's death she had schooled them into calling her "Edith"; she had also succeeded by means of certain modifications in her appearance, not confined entirely to her raiment and her coiffure, in creating the illusion of thirty; and everything she said and did was calculated to confirm this process of self-deception. She loathed old age. The very breath of an old person in the room in which she sat was enough to oppress and stifle her. It always struck her that the bitter smell of corpses was not far distant from the couch whereon they reclined. She wanted youth. Rightly or wrongly she thought she was entitled to the best, and who will deny that youth is the best? She was devotedly attached to young men. She would have required a good deal of persuasion to believe that a man of thirty was too young for her; and if she had deprived herself of this one luxury, it was, as we have seen, simply out of regard for her daughters. She entertained no rooted objection to disparity in ages as a matter of principle.

In the circumstances, Sir Joseph's senile raptures were simply tiresome, and had he not been enormously rich she would have thought them a little presumptuous. But there were many ways in which Sir Joseph Bullion's friendship proved useful to her. He was not only a wealthy man, he was also highly influential, and again and again she had used him and his power for her own private purposes.

She proposed to use him again on this occasion.

"As a matter of fact," she said, correcting herself for the fourth time, "I am not so much indisposed as angry."

"Not with me, I hope?" exclaimed the baronet.

As he proceeded to chuckle asthmatically over the fantastic improbability of this suggestion, the elderly matron with marked irritation called him sharply to order. "Have you read the papers?" she demanded.

"'Ave I read the papers?" he repeated. "Of course I've read the papers."

Occasionally, very occasionally, particularly after periods of much autogenous mirth, Sir Joseph Bullion dropped an H. But he never noticed it. It was a sort of unconscious reverberation of former days; as if his lowly past, especially that portion of it which had been spent with the first and ungrammatical Mrs. Bullion, insisted on revealing itself to the world, to be acknowledged and congratulated on what it had achieved.

"Well then," pursued the widow firmly, "you know about Lord Henry!"

"Lord Henry?" he cried. "What about Lord Henry?"

Mrs. Delarayne began to examine her rings very studiously, as if she wished to make quite certain that none of the stones had gone astray in the last five minutes. "It's all very well, Joseph," she observed quietly; "but if Lord Henry goes—I go. Now understand that once and for all. I can't endure London without him."

"Not really?" he ejaculated, leaning forward. "Are you serious? D'you mean Lord Henry, the biologist or something?"

Mrs. Delarayne continued the close scrutiny of her rings.

"Of course I mean it," she said in the same quiet but utterly unanswerable way. "You have no idea what Lord Henry means to me. He's literally the only young man in London who does not treat me as if I were a creature of mediÆval antiquity."

Sir Joseph crestfallen sank back again hopelessly into the cushions.

Mrs. Delarayne proceeded to explain that owing to the meddlesomeness of some officious busybody on the Executive Council of the Society for Anthropological Research—an old maid she felt certain—Lord Henry Highbarn had been invited to go to Central China as the Society's plenipotentiary, in order to investigate the reasons of China's practical immunity from lunacy and nervous diseases of all kinds. Lord Henry had accepted the honour and was leaving in three months' time. She then picked up the newspaper, and read aloud the concluding paragraph of the article on the subject:

"There now!" she cried, crumpling up the paper and throwing it away. "You see what that means. It means that women like myself are once more to be condemned to the dangerous misunderstanding to which we were exposed before Lord Henry came on the scene. And we certainly can't survive it."

Sir Joseph surveyed his companion's robust figure and healthy countenance for some seconds, and an incredulous smile gradually spread over his flushed and puffy features. "Surely there can't be very much wrong with you—is there?" he dared to suggest for once.

Mrs. Delarayne's eyes suddenly flashed with fire, and she cowed him by a single glance. "Don't talk of things you understand so little," she snapped. "Lord Henry must at all costs be induced to remain in England,—that's your job. He must not go. And anyhow China is such a ridiculous place to go to. Nobody ever goes to China except missionaries. Of course the Chinese haven't any nerves, because they haven't any daughters—they kill them all. That's a very simple way of keeping your mental balance. I confess that the prospect of going to China is not an inviting one, and yet if Lord Henry goes, I don't see what other alternative we poor sufferers will have."

Sir Joseph again glanced dubiously at the healthy woman beside him, and drummed his knees thoughtfully with his large fingers.

"You know without me telling you," he observed at last, "that I'll do whatever you want. It's happened before and it'll happen again." And he rolled his bloodshot eyes as if to make it quite clear that for this great favour a great reward would be expected.

Mrs. Delarayne examined him covertly and began to wonder with a sudden feeling of despair how such a creature could possibly hope to be a match for Lord Henry.

"And if I do induce Lord Henry to remain in England,—what then?" the baronet demanded.

The widow sighed. "You'll be a public benefactor," she said; "a blessing to your race."

"I don't suppose there's much money, is there, in this trip to China?" he asked pompously. "And Lord Henry can't be a very rich man."

"He's very poor," replied Mrs. Delarayne.

Sir Joseph smiled knowingly and lay back amid the cushions with an air of perfect self-appreciation and confidence.

"There's only one thing that great wealth cannot do, it seems to me," he said, smiling and making every kind of grimace indicative of the immense difficulty he was experiencing in not laughing at what was passing through his mind.

Mrs. Delarayne dreaded the worst, but felt that not to press for enlightenment at this juncture would reveal an indifference which would prove unfavourable to her schemes. "And what is that?" she asked.

"It cannot change a woman's fancy, of course!" Sir Joseph ejaculated, and laughed very violently indeed. "'Ave you caught my meaning?" he added, as his hilarity subsided.

Mrs. Delarayne toyed with her book.

"Come, come, Edith!" he pursued. "If I get Lord Henry to remain in London, as I've no doubt I shall,—what then?" He ogled her roguishly.

Mrs. Delarayne tried, while smiling politely, to introduce as little encouragement as possible into her expression.

"Between you and I," the baronet continued, "it isn't as if we had a whole lifetime before us. You may have,—I haven't. These delays are a little unwise at our time of life."

He caught her hand and for some reason, possibly his great agitation, pressed her finger-nails deep into the convex bulb of his large hot thumb, as if he were intent upon testing their sharpness.

Mrs. Delarayne removed her hand. "Joseph, I had hoped you were not going to refer to this again for some while. I have told you hundreds of times, or more, that a woman cannot marry with decency a second time when she has two strapping daughters who have not yet married once."

Sir Joseph shrugged his shoulders.

"It's all very well," pursued the widow, "but it is difficult enough for Cleo to forgive my having married at all. I could not possibly confront her with a second husband before she, poor girl, had met her first. Oh no!—it would be too great an insult. I'd die of shame. No, before you have me you'll have to get my daughters married. That bargain I strike with you."

He smiled ecstatically. "Promise?"

"I promise."

He bent forward and kissed her very clumsily, and Mrs. Delarayne by blowing her nose was able deftly to wipe her mouth without his noticing the movement.

"What is that young fool, my secretary, doing?" he enquired at last. "Did I not bring him and Cleo together all through the spring at Brineweald Park?"

"Denis is a nincompoop," Mrs. Delarayne declared drily. "I don't believe for a minute that we should any of us be here if he had taken Adam's place in the Garden of Eden. What a fortunate thing it was, by-the-by, that the Almighty did not choose a very modern sort of man to live in sin with Eve!"

Sir Joseph laughed. "Denis a nincompoop? I don't believe it."

Mrs. Delarayne snorted.

"But how are they getting on?"

"Don't ask me," she sighed wearily. "They philander. They are now at the very dangerous and inconclusive stage of being 'practically engaged.' It never signifies anything, because no man who really means business has the patience to be practically engaged."

Sir Joseph looked and felt sympathetic.

"They hold hands, I believe," the widow resumed, "and discuss the philosophers. Probably in a year's time if all goes well they will kiss and discuss the poets."

Sir Joseph uttered an expletive of surprise.

"Yes—I'm disappointed in Denis. I don't trust these very cheerful men, who have a ready laugh and a sense of humour. They laugh to conceal the fact that they cannot crow, and they crack jokes because they cannot break hearts. Give me the broody serious men with fierce looks and slow smiles."

"Isn't Cleo in love with him?"

"Poor soul!" Mrs. Delarayne exclaimed. "She does her best. She would take him, of course, simply because it will soon be an indignity for her to remain single one minute longer. She would probably die of shame too if someone else took Denis from her. But I think you know, that the man who provokes Cleo's love will have to be a little bit different from Denis."