is managing
director of the Antibilious Pill Department. I have heard that his
workers sometimes turn out a myriad myriad pills a day in the twenty-four
hours. Fancy a myriad myriad!"

"A myriad myriad. No wonder he looks proud," said Graham. "Pills! What a
wonderful time it is! That man in purple?"

"He is not quite one of the inner circle, you know. But we like him. He
is really clever and very amusing. He is one of the heads of the Medical
Faculty of our London University. All medical men, you know, wear that
purple. But, of course, people who are paid by fees for _doing_
something--" She smiled away the social pretensions of all such people.

"Are any of your great artists or authors here?"

"No authors. They are mostly such queer people--and so preoccupied about
themselves. And they quarrel so dreadfully! They will fight, some of
them, for precedence on staircases! Dreadful, isn't it? But I think
Wraysbury, the fashionable capillotomist, is here. From Capri."

"Capillotomist," said Graham. "Ah! I remember. An artist! Why not?"

"We have to cultivate him," she said apologetically. "Our heads are in
his hands." She smiled.

Graham hesitated at the invited compliment, but his glance was
expressive. "Have the arts grown with the rest of civilised things?" he
said. "Who are your great painters?"

She looked at him doubtfully. Then laughed. "For a moment," she said, "I
thought you meant--" She laughed again. "You mean, of course, those good
men you used to think so much of because they could cover great spaces of
canvas with oil-colours? Great oblongs. And people used to put the things
in gilt frames and hang them up in rows in their square rooms. We haven't
any. People grew tired of that sort of thing."

"But what did you think I meant?"

She put a finger significantly on a cheek whose glow was above suspicion,
and smiled and looked very arch and pretty and inviting. "And here," and
she indicated her eyelid.

Graham had an adventurous moment. Then a grotesque memory of a picture he
had somewhere seen of Uncle Toby and the widow flashed across his mind.
An archaic shame came upon him. He became acutely aware that he was
visible to a great number of interested people. "I see," he remarked
inadequately. He turned awkwardly away from her fascinating facility. He
looked about him to meet a number of eyes that immediately occupied
themselves with other things. Possibly he coloured a little. "Who is that
talking w