jowl with
God-forsaken, glorious old Omar."

A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald's hollow cheeks.

"Really," he said, with obvious embarrassment, "I--they were a great
failure. 'Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in
dealing with finance,' as _The Times_ said in reviewing them."

"Well, in the course of your career you've done some good things for
England financially, haven't you?--not very publicly, perhaps, but as a
minister abroad."

"Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake."

"Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same
though. I saw all the faults and read 'em twenty times."

He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that
there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.

"Where have you two been?" he continued, with a directness that was
almost rude.

"Dining with the Holmes," answered Pierce.

"That ruffian! Did she sing?"

"Yes, twice."

"Wish I'd heard her. Here am I playing Saul without a David. Many people
there?"

"Several. Lady Cardington--"

"That white-haired enchantress! There's a Niobe--weeping not for her
children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of
half Mayfair, though I don't know whether she's got a religion. Men
who wouldn't look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six,
worship her now she's sixty. And she weeps for her youth! Who else?"

"Mrs. Wolfstein."

"A daughter of Israel; coarse, intelligent, brutal to her reddened
finger-tips. I'd trust her to judge a singer, actor, painter, writer.
But I wouldn't trust her with my heart or half a crown."

"Lady Manby."

"Humour in petticoats. She's so infernally full of humour that there's
no room in her for anything else. I doubt if she's got lungs. I'm sure
she hasn't got a heart or a brain."

"But if she is so full of humour," said Sir Donald mildly, "how does
she--?"

"How does a great writer fail over an addition sum? How does a man who
speaks eight languages talk imbecility in them all? How is it that a
bird isn't an angel? I wish to Heaven we knew. Well, Robin?"

"Of course, Mr. Bry."

Carey's violent face expressed disgust in every line.

"One of the most finished of London types," he exclaimed. "No other city
supplies quite the same sort of man to take the colour out of things.
He's enormously clever, enormously abominable, and should have been
strangled at birth merely because of