ll the very
well-dressed and very expensively-dressed women, and all the men who
admired and desired them as they moved, in voluptuous perfection, amid
dazzling pictures with the soft illumination of screened skylights
above and the reflections in polished parquet below--all of both sexes
were comfortably conscious of virtue in the undoubted fact that they
were helping to support two renowned hospitals where at that very
moment dissevered legs and arms were being thrown into buckets.

In a little room at the end of the galleries was a small but choice
collection of the etchings of Felicien Rops: a collection for
connoisseurs, as the critics were to point out in the newspapers the
next morning. For Rops, though he had an undeniable partiality for
subjects in which ugly and prurient women displayed themselves in
nothing but the inessentials of costume, was a classic before whom it
was necessary to bow the head in homage.

G.J. was in this room in company with a young and handsome Staff
officer, Lieutenant Molder, home on convalescent leave from Suvla Bay.
Mr. Molder had left Oxford in order to join the army; he had behaved
admirably, and well earned the red shoulder-ornaments which pure
accident had given him. He was a youth of artistic and literary
tastes, with genuine ambitions quite other than military, and after a
year of horrible existence in which he had hungered for the arts
more than for anything, he was solacing and renewing himself in the
contemplation of all the masterpieces that London could show. He
greatly esteemed G.J.'s connoisseurship, and G.J. had taken him in
hand. At the close of a conscientious and highly critical round of
the galleries they had at length reached the Rops room, and they
were discussing every aspect of Rops except his lubricity, when Lady
Queenie Paulle approached them from behind. Molder was the first to
notice her and turn. He blushed.

"Well, Queen," said G.J., who had already had several conversations
with her in the galleries that day and on the previous days of
preparation.

She replied:

"Well, I hope you're satisfied with the results of your beautiful
idea."

The young woman, slim and pale, had long since gone out of mourning.
She was most brilliantly attired, and no detail lacked to the
perfection of her modish outfit. Indeed, just as she was, she would
have made a marvellous mannequin, except for the fact that mannequins
are not usually allowed to perfume themselves