ushered us into the transfigured
drawing-room. Mrs. Le Geyt, in a pretty cloth dress, neatly tailor-made,
rose to meet us, beaming the vapid smile of the perfect hostess--that
impartial smile which falls, like the rain from Heaven, on good and
bad indifferently. "SO charmed to see you again, Dr. Cumberledge!" she
bubbled out, with a cheerful air--she was always cheerful, mechanically
cheerful, from a sense of duty. "It IS such a pleasure to meet dear
Hugo's old friends! AND Miss Wade, too; how delightful! You look so
well, Miss Wade! Oh, you're both at St. Nathaniel's now, aren't you?
So you can come together. What a privilege for you, Dr. Cumberledge, to
have such a clever assistant--or, rather, fellow-worker. It must be a
great life, yours, Miss Wade; such a sphere of usefulness! If we can
only feel we are DOING GOOD--that is the main matter. For my own part,
I like to be mixed up with every good work that's going on in my
neighbourhood. I'm the soup-kitchen, you know, and I'm visitor at the
workhouse; and I'm the Dorcas Society, and the Mutual Improvement Class;
and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and to Children, and I'm sure
I don't know how much else; so that, what with all that, and what with
dear Hugo and the darling children"--she glanced affectionately at
Maisie and Ettie, who sat bolt upright, very mute and still, in their
best and stiffest frocks, on two stools in the corner--"I can hardly
find time for my social duties."

"Oh, dear Mrs. Le Geyt," one of her visitors said with effusion,
from beneath a nodding bonnet--she was the wife of a rural dean
from Staffordshire--"EVERYBODY is agreed that YOUR social duties are
performed to a marvel. They are the envy of Kensington. We all of us
wonder, indeed, how one woman can find time for all of it!"

Our hostess looked pleased. "Well, yes," she answered, gazing down
at her fawn-coloured dress with a half-suppressed smile of
self-satisfaction, "I flatter myself I CAN get through about as much
work in a day as anybody!" Her eye wandered round her rooms with a
modest air of placid self-approval which was almost comic. Everything in
them was as well-kept and as well-polished as good servants, thoroughly
drilled, could make it. Not a stain or a speck anywhere. A miracle of
neatness. Indeed, when I carelessly drew the Norwegian dagger from its
scabbard, as we waited for lunch, and found that it stuck in the sheath,
I almost started to discover that rust could intr