ith her iron and gold; and I
bet you that your friend Worth will manage to cut Lady Coltsfoot's gowns
so that one shoulder higher than the other will become all the rage next
season."

"Of course you set no store on such a simple thing as happiness," says
his wife, with acerbity.

"Happiness? Lord, my dear! Happiness was buried with Strephon and Chloe
centuries ago! We are amused or bored, we are successful or
unsuccessful, we are popular or unpopular, we are somebody or we are
nobody, but we are never either happy or miserable."

"People who have a heart are still both!"

"A heart! You mean spoons!"

"What a hideous expression! Strephon and Chloe never used that."

"When we have an unfortunate passion now," remarks Mr. Wootton, "we go
to Carlsbad. It's only an affair of the liver."

"Or the nerves," suggests Usk. "Flirtation is the proper thing:
flirtation never hurts anybody: it's like puff-paste, seltzer water, and
Turkish cigarettes."

"Puff-paste may bring on an indigestion when one's too old to eat it!"

"There! Didn't I tell you so? She is always saying something about my
age. A man is the age that he feels."

"No, a woman is the age that she looks. If you will quote things, quote
them properly."

"The age that she looks? That's so very variable. She's twenty when she
enters a ball-room at midnight, she's fifty when she comes out at
sunrise; she's sixteen when she goes to meet somebody at Hurlingham,
she's sixty when she scolds her maid and has a scene with her husband!"

Lady Usk interrupts him with vivacity: "And he? Pray, isn't he
five-and-twenty when he's in Paris alone, and five-and-ninety when he's
grumbling at home?"

"Because he's bored at home! Youth is, after all, only good spirits. If
you laugh you are young, but your wife don't make you laugh; you pay her
bills, and go with her to a state ball, and sit opposite to her at
dinner, and when you catch a cold she is always there to say, 'My dear,
didn't I tell you so?' but I defy any man living to recall any hour of
his existence in which his wife ever made him laugh!"

"And yet you wanted me to ask married people together."

"Because I wanted it all to be highly proper and deadly dull. Surrenden
has got a sort of reputation of being a kind of Orleans Club."

"And yet you complain of being bored in it!"

"One is always bored in one's own house! One can never take in to dinner
the person one likes."

"You make up to yourself for the d