p, white-gloved hand and beamed
good-naturedly upon my frozen aunt.

"Who's your lady friend, Smithie, my dear?" demanded London's Love, who
had never looked more showily vulgar.

The grimy background of street and police-court walls seemed to throw up
the sudden ins-and-outs of her sumptuous, rather short-legged figure,
topped by that glittering hair and finished off by a pair of
fantastically high-heeled French boots of the finest and whitest kid.

No wonder my fastidious aunt gazed upon her with that petrified look!

London's Love didn't seem to see it. She went on gaily: "Didn't half
fill the stalls, our party this morning, what, what? Might have been
'some' divorce case! Now for a spot of lunch to wash it all down. We're
all going on to the Cecil. Come on, Jim," to Mr. Burke.

"Come on--I didn't catch your boy's name, Miss Smith--yours, I mean,"
tapping the arm of Mr. Reginald Brace, who looked very nearly as frozen
as my aunt herself. "Still, you'll come. And you, dear?"

This to no less a person than Miss Anastasia Lovelace.

"This is my aunt, Miss Lovelace," I put in hurriedly. "Aunt Anastasia,
this is Miss Vassity, who, as you said, was kind enough to--to go bail
for us just now in court----"

The bend of my aunt's neck and frumpy hat towards Miss Vi Vassity was
something more crushingly frigid than the cut direct would have been.

Still London's Love took it all in good part; holding out that plump
white paw of hers, and taking my aunt's untendered hand warmly into her
own.

"Pleased to meet you," she said heartily. "Your little niece here is a
great pal o' mine. I was sorry to see her in a mess. Shockin' naughty
girl, though, isn't she? Nickin' rubies. Tut, tut. Why didn't you bring
her up better, eh?" suggested England's Premier Comedienne.

There are absolutely no words to describe the deepening of the horror on
poor Aunt Anastasia's face as she looked and listened and "took in"
generally the society in which her only niece found herself!

Miss Vi Vassity's loud, gay tones seemed to permeate that group and that
situation just as a racing wave ripples over pebbles and seaweed and
sand-castles alike.

"Girls will be girls! I never intend to be anything else myself,"
announced the artiste joyously. "You're coming along with her,
Miss--Lovelace, is it? Pretty stage name that 'ud make, boys. 'Miss Love
Lace,' eh? Look dandy on the bills. You'll sit next your young niece
here, and see she don't go