e each week at her
handsome villa two large luncheons, one small and select dinner where no
untitled person was invited, and a huge Saturday afternoon tea at the
Mentone Casino, with a variety entertainment thrown in. She had rented a
villa last occupied by a notorious semi-royal personage, and engaged at
great expense one of the best _chefs_ to be had on the Riviera; had
indeed, figuratively speaking, snapped him out of the mouth of a duke;
and somehow, no one quite knew how, had succeeded, after nerve-racking
efforts, in capturing a few of the bright, particular stars whose light
really counted in the social illumination of the Riviera. To get them in
the first instance, she had been obliged to give a dance, and to offer
cotillon favours worth at least five hundred francs each; and these
things had been alluringly displayed in a fashionable jeweller's window
for a week before the entertainment, just at the time when people were
making up their minds whether or not to accept "that weird creature's"
invitations. Afterward she had clinched matters by importing _en masse_
a world-famed troop of dancers from the theatre at Monte Carlo to her
villa at Mentone, paying them a thousand pounds for the evening; but her
reward had been adequate. She was becoming a sort of habit--like a
comfortable old coat--among the great, who like comfortable old coats as
well as do those who are not great, and quite important persons were
already forgetting to allude to her as a weird creature in confessing
that they had accepted her invitations. She had even become of
consequence enough to snub Lady Dauntrey at the opera in Monte Carlo,
although, early in the season, the Dauntreys had been the first members
of the peerage who had adorned her villa. As for Mrs. Holbein, of whose
acquaintance she had almost boasted in prehistoric days when Sir Henry
was only an alderman, Lady Meason now loudly refused to know her.

At first, Mrs. Cayley-Binns and her daughter (spelt Alys) had looked
from afar off at the magnificent villa of this notable hostess, and had
read enviously the paragraphs in London and Riviera papers describing
her entertainments, not missing one of the long list of names attached.
Then one day they had come across the name of Miss Constantia Sutfield,
a woman who had been governess to a royal princess. Morton Cayley,
M. D., their distant cousin, had cured Miss Sutfield of a malady
pronounced fatal by other physicians with fewer lette