which she offered us a few minutes later, and
begged us to drink without milk, was the most exquisite I have tasted
outside Russia. She informed us that she got it direct from Moscow.

"I can't stand your black Ceylon tea," she remarked, with a grimace.

And yet she could smoke "fags." I wondered what other contradictious
tastes she possessed. No doubt she could eat blood puddings with relish
and had a discriminating palate for claret. Truly, a perplexing lady.

"You must find leisure in London a great change after your adventurous
career," said I, by way of polite conversation.

"I just love it. I'm as lazy as a cat," she said, settling with her
pantherine grace among the cushions. "Do you know what has been my
ambition ever since I was a kid?"

"Whatever of woman's ambitions you had you must have attained," said I,
with a bow.

"Pooh!" she said. "You mean that I can have crowds of men falling
in love with me. That's rubbish." She was certainly frank. "I meant
something quite different. I wonder whether you can understand. The
world used to seem to me divided into two classes that never met--we
performing people and the public, the thousand white faces that looked
at us and went away and talked to other white faces and forgot all about
performing animals till they came next time. Now I've got what I wanted.
See? I'm one of the public."

"And you love Philistia better than Bohemia?" I asked.

She knitted her brows and looked at me puzzled.

"If you want to talk to me," she said, "you must talk straight. I've had
no more education than a tinker's dog."

She made this peculiar announcement, not defiantly, not rudely, but
appealingly, graciously. It was not a rebuke for priggishness; it was
the unpresentable statement of a fact. I apologized for a lunatic habit
of speech and paraphrased my question.

"In a word," cried Dale, coming in on my heels with an elucidation of my
periphrasis, "what de Gex is driving at is--Do you prefer respectability
to ramping round?"

She turned slowly to him. "My dear boy, when do you think I was not
respectable?"

He jumped from the sofa as if the Chow dog had bitten him.

"Good Heavens, I never meant you to take it that way!"

She laughed, stretched up a lazy arm to him, and looked at him somewhat
quizzically in the face as he kissed her finger-tips. Although I could
have boxed the silly fellow's ears, I vow he did it in a very pretty
fashion. The young man of the day, as