her over Sir Joseph's shoulder and puzzling about her. And
this made her wretchedly uncomfortable, for perhaps, after all, she
fretted, he had indeed met her somewhere before, somewhere in one of
those odious strata she had passed through on her way up to the estate
of being called daughter by Lady Webling.

She forgot her misgivings and was restored to equanimity by the
incursion of Polly Widdicombe and her husband. Polly was one of the
best-dressed women in the world. Her husband had the look of the
husband of the best-dressed woman in the world. Polly had a wiry
voice, and made no effort to soften it, but she was tremendously
smart. She giggled all the time and set people off in her vicinity,
though her talk was rarely witty on its own account.

Laughter rippled all through her life. She talked of her griefs in
a plucky, riant way, making eternal fun of herself as a giddy fool.
She carried a delightful jocundity wherever she went. She was
aristocratic, too, in the postgraduate degree of being careless,
reckless, superior even to good manners. She had a good heart and
amiable feelings; these made manners enough.

She had lineage as well, for her all-American family ran straight back
into the sixteen hundreds, which was farther than many a duke dared
trace his line. She had traveled the world; she had danced with kings,
and had made two popes laugh and tweak her pointed chin. She wasn't
afraid of anybody, not even of peasants and servants, or of being
friendly with them, or angry with them.

Marie Louise adored her. She felt that it would make no difference to
Polly's affection if she found out all there was to find out about
Marie Louise. And yet Polly's friendship did not have the dull
certainty of indestructibility. Marie Louise knew that one word wrong
or one act out of key might end it forever, and then Polly would be
her loud and ardent enemy, and laugh at her instead of for her. Polly
could hate as briskly as she could love.

She was in one of her vitriolic moods now because of the _Lusitania_.

"I shouldn't have come to-night," she said, "except that I want to
talk to a lot of people about Germany. I want to tell everybody I know
how much I loathe 'em all. 'The Hymn of Hate' is a lullaby to what I
feel."

Polly was also conducting a glorious war with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. Lady
C.-W. had bullied everybody in London so successfully that she went
straight up against Polly Widdicombe without a tremor. She got