handsome she is, so long as she isn't handsome in my style. Of course,
I don't say I could stand it if she was the very moral of me."

"I say, supposing Toodles met the very moral of herself?"

"Could Toodles have a moral? I doubt it."

"I want to know what she'd do with it."

"Yes, by Jove, what _would_ you do?"

"Do? I should do my worst. I should make her sit somewhere with a good
strong light on her."

"Hold hard there," said her brother-in-law (the man who called her
Toodles), "Lady Cayley doesn't want that lamp lit just yet"

In the silence of the rest, the name seemed to leap straight across the
room to Anne.

The two women beside her heard it, and looked at each other and at her.
Anne sickened under their eyes, struck suddenly by the meaning of their
protection and their sympathy. She longed to rise, to sweep them aside
and go. But she was kept motionless by some superior instinct of disdain.

Outwardly she appeared in no way concerned by this revelation of the
presence of Lady Cayley. She might never have heard of her, for any
knowledge that her face betrayed.

Majendie, not far from the settee in the window, was handing cucumber
sandwiches to an old lady. And Lady Cayley had taken the matches from the
maid and was lighting the lamp herself, and was saying, "I'm not afraid
of the light yet, I assure you. There--look at me."

Everybody looked at her, and she looked at everybody, as she sat in the
lamplight, and let it pour over her. She seemed to be offering herself
lavishly, recklessly, triumphantly, to the light.

Lady Cayley was a large woman of thirty-seven, who had been a slender and
a pretty woman at thirty. She would have been pretty still if she had
been a shade less large. She had tiny upward-tilted features in her large
white face; but the lines of her jaw and her little round prominent chin
were already vanishing in a soft enveloping fold, flushed through its
whiteness with a bloom that was a sleeping colour. Her forehead and
eyelids were exceedingly white, so white that against them her black
eyebrows and blue eyes were vivid and emphatic. Her head carried high a
Gainsborough hat of white felt, with black plumes and a black line round
its brim. Under its upward and its downward curve her light brown hair
was tossed up, and curled, and waved, and puffed into an appearance of
great exuberance and volume. Exuberance and volume were the note of this
lady, a note subdued a little by the art