f her gown. When she dined
out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her,
when she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne,
and looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always
peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them."

"And lots of people don't," said Mrs. Wolfstein.

"The vices are divinely comic," continued Lady Manby, looking every
moment more like a teapot. "I think it's such a mercy. Fancy what a lot
of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!"

Lady Cardington looked shocked.

"The virtues are often more comic than the vices," said Mrs. Trent,
with calm authority. "Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good
farces whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the
wicked world."

"I didn't know anyone called respectability a virtue," cried Sally
Perceval.

"Oh, all the English do in their hearts," said Mrs. Wolfstein.
"Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?"

Miss Schley was eating _sole a la Colbert_ with her eyes on her plate.
She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.

"We're pretty respectable over in America, I suppose," she drawled. "Why
not? What harm does it do anyway?"

"Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is
strictly respectable life is plain sailing."

"Oh, life is never that," said Mrs. Trent, "for women."

Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.

"Never, never," she said in her curious voice--a voice in which tears
seemed for ever to be lingering. "We women are always near the rocks."

"Or on them," said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands
she had divorced.

"I like a good shipwreck," exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice.
"I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and
I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show
their mettle."

"It's always dangerous to speak figuratively if she's anywhere about,"
murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. "She'll talk about lowering boats
and life-preservers now till the end of lunch."

Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but
had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect
created in the room by the actress's presence in it. The magic of a
name flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the
youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatien