on the stage that I feel as if people
were always watching me and criticising me, even when I go out to
dinner.'

'I've no right at all to give you my opinion, because I'm nobody in
particular,' answered Lady Maud, 'and you are tremendously famous and
all that! But you'll make yourself miserable for nothing if you get
into the way of caring about anybody's opinion of you, except on the
stage. And you'll end by making the other people uncomfortable too,
because you'll make them think that you mean to teach them manners!'

'Heaven forbid!' Margaret laughed again.

The carriage stopped, and Lady Maud thanked her, bade her good-night,
and got out.

'No,' she said, as the footman was going to ring the bell, 'I have a
latch-key, thank you.'

It was a small house in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, and the
windows were quite dark. There was not even a light in the hall when
Margaret saw Lady Maud open the front door and disappear within.

Margaret went over the little incidents of the evening as she drove
home alone, and felt better satisfied with herself than she had been
since Lushington's visit, in spite of having deliberately gone to
sleep in Mustapha Pasha's drawing-room. No one had made her feel that
she was changed except for the better, and Lady Maud, who was most
undoubtedly a smart woman of the world, had taken a sudden fancy to
her. Margaret told herself that this would be impossible if she were
ever so little vulgarised by her stage life, and in this reflection
she consoled herself for what Lushington had said, and nursed her
resentment against him.

The small weaknesses of celebrities are sometimes amazing. There was a
moment that evening, as she stood before her huge looking-glass before
undressing and scrutinised her face in it, when she would have given
her fame and her fortune to be Lady Maud, who trusted to a passing
hansom or an acquaintance's carriage for getting home from an Embassy,
who let herself into a dark and cheerless little house with a
latch-key, who was said to be married to a slippery foreigner, and
about whom the gossips invented unedifying tales.

Margaret wondered whether Lady Maud would ever think of changing
places with her, to be a goddess for a few hours every week, to have
more money than she could spend on herself, and to be pursued with
requests for autographs and grand pianos, not to mention invitations
to supper from those supernal personages whose uneasy heads wear
crowns