but I don't choose you should give 'em opportunity
for it."

"Oh, nonsense!"

"Not nonsense at all. This house is a kind of Agapemone, a sort of
Orleans Club."

"You ought not to be bored in it, then."

"One is always bored at one's own place. I tell you I don't like your
people. You ask everybody who wants to meet somebody else; and it's
never respectable. It's a joke at the clubs. Jack's always saying to his
Jill, 'We'll get Lady Usk to ask us together,' and they do. I say it's
indecent."

"But, my dear, if Jack sulks without his Jill, and if Jill's in bad form
without Jack, one must ask them together. I want people to like me and
to enjoy themselves."

"Enjoy themselves! That means flirting till all's blue with somebody
you'd hate if you'd married her."

"What does that matter, so long as they're amused?"

"What an immoral woman you are, Dolly! To hear you----"

"I only mean that I don't think it matters; you know it doesn't matter;
everybody's always doing it."

"If you'd only ask some of the women's husbands, some of the men's
wives----"

"I couldn't do that, dear. I want people to like my house!"

"Just as I say--you're so immoral."

"No, I'm not. Nobody ever pays a bill for me, except you."

"Enviable distinction! Pay! I think I do pay! Though why you can't keep
within your pin-money----"

"Pin-money means money to buy pins. I did buy two diamond pins with it
last year, eight hundred guineas each."

"You ought to buy clothes."

"Clothes! What an expression! I can't buy a child's frock even; it all
goes in little things, and all my own money too; wedding-presents,
christening-presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it's all
nonsense you're grumbling about my bills to Worth and Elise and Virot;
Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which it
describes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear and
make them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, and
their whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they had
tortoise-shell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs had
jewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is nothing new, though
you talk as if it were a crime and we'd invented it!"

Usk laughs a little crossly as she comes to the end of her breathless
sentences. "_Naso Magister eris_," he remarks, "might certainly be
inscribed over the chamber doors of all your friends!"

"I know you mean something odious. My