Her cousin glanced at her for a moment with a tinge of uneasy inquiry.
She was not very sharp, although she was very receptive of modern
philosophy.

"Well," she said, a little doubtfully, "not quite that, I suppose."

"We are to sin on the house-top and in the street, instead of in the
privacy of a room with the door locked. But what will the London County
Council say?"

"Oh, they have nothing to do with our class. They only concern
themselves with acrobats, and respectable elderly women who are fired
from cannons. That is so right. Respectable elderly women do so much
harm. Mr. Amarinth said to-night--in the garden scene, if you
remember--that prolonged purity wrinkled the mind as much as prolonged
impurity wrinkled the face. Nature forces us to choose whether we will
spoil our faces with our sins, or our minds with our virtues. How true."

"And how original. This Bovril is very comforting, Betty; as reviving
as--an epigram."

"Yes, my cook understands it. That must be so sweet for the Bovril--to
be understood! Do you like Lord Reggie?"

"He has a beautiful face. How old is he? Twenty?"

"Oh no, nearly twenty-five. Three years younger than you are. That is
all."

"He looks astonishingly young."

"Yes. He says that his sins keep him fresh. A sinner with a young lamb's
heart among the full grown flocks of saints, you know. Such a quaint
idea, so original."

"I want you to tell me which is original, Mr. Amarinth or Lord Reggie?"

"Oh! they both are."

"No, they are too much alike. When we meet with the Tweedledum and
Tweedledee in mind, one of them is always a copy, an echo of the other."

"Do you think so? Well, of course Mr. Amarinth has been original longer
than Lord Reggie, because he is nearly twenty years older."

"Then Lord Reggie is the echo. What a pity he is not merely vocal."

"What do you mean, dear?"

"Oh! nothing. And who started the fashion of the green carnation?"

"That was Mr. Amarinth's idea. He calls it the arsenic flower of an
exquisite life. He wore it, in the first instance, because it blended so
well with the colour of absinthe. Lord Reggie and he are great friends.
They are quite inseparable."

"Yes."

"They are both coming down to stay with me in Surrey next week, and I
want you to come too. I always spend a week in the country in June, a
week of perfect rusticity. It is like a dear little desert in the oasis,
you know. We do nothing, and we eat a great deal. Nobody c