at work for at least a fortnight. There was a room full of
people waiting.

"Unusually hard at work!" Mrs. Delarayne observed.

"Yes," replied the matron, "quite exceptional."

"And why is that?" the widow enquired.

"We think it is the heat. The dog days seem somehow to increase nervous
trouble in quite a number of people,--at least so Lord Henry says."

"Then you may be sure it is so," said Mrs. Delarayne emphatically. She
was taken to a private room, and there in a few minutes Lord Henry
joined her.

He listened with his usual earnestness to all she had to tell him, and
learned as much as he could from the description of her untrained
observation of Cleopatra's symptoms.

"What is it, Lord Henry,--do tell me,--that makes grown-up men of the
present day so susceptible to raw flappers? You surely have an
explanation!"

"I have," Lord Henry replied, smiling in his malicious way. "It is
accounted for by the whole trend of modern sentiment and modern
prejudice. It is in the air. It is the result of the nineteenth
century's absurd exaltation of rude untrammelled nature. It really
amounts to anarchy, because it is always accompanied by a certain
feeling of hostility towards law and culture. Hence the love of wild
rugged moors and mountains which is a modern mania."

"Oh, didn't the ancients admire these things?" the lady exclaimed a
little crestfallen.

"Of course they didn't," Lord Henry replied. "Hence, too, the ridiculous
present-day exaltation of childhood, because children are stupidly
supposed to trail 'clouds of glory' from whence they come, as that old
spinster Wordsworth assures us. In fact everything immature or
uncultivated is supposed to be sacrosanct. Of course that young man,
Denis Malster, must be a sentimentalist, too, and he probably wants
kicking badly; but it is not entirely his fault. The sentiment, as I
say, is in the air. We are all threatened with infection. They had it in
the eighteenth century in France."

"What can I do?" Mrs. Delarayne demanded.

"Nothing!"

"But I can't let Cleopatra fall about in all directions,--she'll kill
herself."

"What did the doctor say?"

"Need you ask?"

"Prescribed iron and strychnine, I suppose. Or did he suggest cold
baths?"

"No, as you say, he prescribed iron, quinine, and strychnine."

Lord Henry glanced at his note-book.

"Of course, I am absolutely full up. But--but----"

Mrs. Delarayne fidgeted.

"I'm afraid I shall have to come i