Then she gave a little laugh--a queer laugh
that might have had no heart in it, or too much for the ordinary
purposes of life. She shrugged her shoulders and took up a magazine,
with which she returned to the chair placed for her before the fire by
Claude de Chauxville.

In a few minutes Maggie came into the room. She was carrying a bundle of
flannel.

"The weakest thing I ever did," she said cheerfully, "was to join Lady
Crewel's working guild. Two flannel petticoats for the young by Thursday
morning. I chose the young because the petticoats are so ludicrously
small."

"If you never do anything weaker than that," said Etta, looking into the
fire, "you will not come to much harm."

"Perhaps not; what have you been doing--something weaker?"

"Yes. I have been quarrelling with M. de Chauxville."

Maggie held up a petticoat by the selvage (which a male writer takes to
be the lower hem), and looked at her cousin through the orifice intended
for the waist of the young.

"If one could manage it without lowering one's dignity," she said, "I
think that that is the best thing one could possibly do with M. de
Chauxville."

Etta had taken up the magazine again. She was pretending to read it.

"Yes; but he knows too much--about every-body," she said.

CHAPTER VI

THE TALLEYRAND CLUB

It has been said of the Talleyrand Club that the only qualifications
required for admittance to its membership are a frock-coat and a glib
tongue. To explain the whereabouts of the Talleyrand Club were only a
work of supererogation. Many hansom cabmen know it. Hansom cabmen know
more than they are credited with.

The Talleyrand, as its name implies, is a diplomatic club, but
ambassadors and ministers enter not its portals. They send their
juniors. Some of these latter are in the habit of stating that London is
the hub of Europe and the Talleyrand smoking-room its grease-box.
Certain is it that such men as Claude de Chauxville, as Karl Steinmetz,
and a hundred others who are or have been political scene-shifters, are
to be found in the Talleyrand rooms.

It is a quiet club, with many members and sparse accommodation. Its
rooms are never crowded, because half of its members are afraid of
meeting the other half. It has swinging glass doors to its every
apartment, the lower portion of the glass being opaque, while the upper
moiety affords a peep-hole. Thus, if you are sitting in one of the deep,
comfortable chairs to be found in