id Molly ingenuously. 'You might have sent me picture
postcards, you know.'

Skilfully enough Victoria explained that she had lost Molly's address.
Her friend blissfully accepted all she said, but a few other women less
ingenuous than the clergyman's wife were casting sharp glances at her.
When they parted, Victoria audaciously giving her address as 'care of
Mrs Ferris, Elm Tree Place,' she threw herself back on the cushions of
the cab and told herself that she could not again go through with the
ordeal of facing her own class. She almost hungered for the morrow, when
she was to entertain the class she had adopted.

CHAPTER XII

THE Fulton household had always been short of money, for Dick spent too
much himself to leave anything for entertaining; thus Victoria had very
little experience of lunch parties. Since she had left the Holts she
hardly remembered a bourgeois meal. The little affair on the Wednesday
was therefore provocative of much thought. Mutton was dismissed as
common, beef in any form as coarse; Laura's suggestion (for Laura and
Augusta had been called in) of a savoury sauerkraut ('mit Blutwurst,
Frankfurter, Leberwurst, etc.'), was also dismissed. Both servants took
a keen interest in the occasion.

'But why no gentleman come?' asked Laura, who was clearly ill-disposed
to do her best for her own sex.

'In the house I was . . .' began Augusta . . . then she froze up under
Victoria's eye. Her mistress still had a strain of the prig in her.

Then Augusta suggested hors d'oeuvres, smoked salmon, anchovies,
olives, radishes; Laura forced forward fowl _a la Milanaise_ to be
preceded by baked John Dory cayenne. Then Augusta in a moment of
inspiration thought of French beans and vegetable marrow . . . stuffed
with chestnuts. The three women laughed, Laura clapped her hands with
the sheer joy of the creative artist.

When Victoria came into the dining-room at half-past twelve she was
almost dazzled by her own magnificence. Neither the Carlton nor the
Savoy could equal the blaze of her plate, the brilliant polish of her
tablecloths. The dahlias blazed dark red in cut glass by the side of
pale belated roses from the garden. On the sideboard fat peaches were
heaped in a modern Lowestoft bowl, and amber-coloured plums lay like
portly dowagers in velvet.

A few minutes before the hour Zoe and Lissa arrived together. They were
nervous; not on account of Victoria's spread, for they were of the upper
stra