nd taking little pleasure in
them until they were known to everybody.

"_Liaisons_ have become as official as marriages. Who doesn't know--"
And Harding mentioned a number of celebrated 'affairs' which had
been going on for ten, some twenty years. "The real love affair of
her ladyship now is probably some little tenor or drawing-master,
and Cecil's a little milliner; but her ladyship and Cecil are forced
to keep up appearances, for if they didn't who would talk about them
any more?"

"You should write that as a short story," Owen suggested. And the two
friends began to argue as to the number of lovers which fell to the
lot of fashionable women, from the age of twenty-three to fifty. Two
or three ladies were mentioned whose _liaisons_ reached a couple of
hundred, and there was another about whom they were not agreed, for
some of her _liaisons_ had lasted so long that Owen did not believe
she had had more than fifty lovers.

"It is impossible to imagine any time for a young man more propitious
than the present, or any society more agreeable than London. Morals,
as the newspapers would say, are in abeyance, conscience is looked
upon as pedantic, especially in women, and unbecoming." As the two
walked up St. James' Street together, Harding noticed that Owen,
notwithstanding his chatter about morals, was thinking of Evelyn,
and took very little interest in the display of the season--in the
slim nobility of England, fresh from Oxford, all in frock coats for
the first time, delighting in canes, and deerskin gloves, in collars
and ties, the newest fashion, going down the street in pairs,
turning into their clubs, lifting their hats to the women who drove
past in victorias and electric broughams.

"Never were women more charming than they are now," Owen said, in
order not to appear too much immersed in his own thoughts, and he
picked a woman out, pretending to be interested in her. "That one
leaning a little to the left, her white dog sitting beside her."

"Like a rose in Maytime."

"Rather an orchid in a crystal glass."

Harding accepted the correction.

"Do you know who she is, Harding?"

The question was a thoughtless one, for no one knows the whole of the
peerage, not even Harding, and it was painful for him to admit that
he did not know the lady, who happened to be an earl's daughter--
somebody he really should have known. Not having been born a peer
himself, he had, as a friend once said, resolved to make amend