luck! Did you think it was for eight?"

"I thought your note said eight o'clock."

"Then it was my beastly handwriting. But I'm awfully glad, all the same.
Now we can have a comfy talk."

Sophy sat in a little Louis XVI chair and watched the hair-dressing. She
thought, as she so often did, how much prettier it would look dressed
simply, without being frizzled so elaborately in front and puffed so
intricately behind. Mrs. Arundel's face had taken on the serious look
that women's faces wear when their hair is being dressed. Her eyes were
large and candid, of a soft Madonna-blue. Her small, prettily shaped
mouth was pastel pink. All her features were small and prettily shaped.
She was the type of woman who still looks girlish at thirty-five. As
Sophy watched her she was also thinking of how even her friends said
that "Olive was never happy unless she had a lover." Three years in
England had taught Sophy that a woman may be an excellent mother, a good
friend, an attentive wife, and yet have "lovers." How strange it seemed
to her! She could not imagine such a thing happening without an upheaval
of the universe--her universe, at least. She could understand a woman,
made desperate by unhappiness, "running away" from her husband with
another man--but to go on living with one man as his wife and having a
lover--lovers---- She had given up trying to solve it. She knew that
Olive's present flame was a Roman nobleman--Count Varesca--an attache of
the Italian Embassy. She seemed to bloom under it into a sort of
recrudescence of virginal charm.

"How you stare with your great eyes, you dear!" said Olive. "Don't I
look nice?"

"You look perfectly lovely."

"Wait till you see what a deevy frock Jean has sent me."

"Jean Worth?"

"Is there any other Jean?"

Sophy laughed.

Then Olive sent Marie away.

"You know, Sophy dear, I really have something to tell you."

"Is it nice?"

"No, it's nasty ... perfectly disgusting!"

"What is it about?"

"Your dear mother-in-law--Lady Wychcote."

Sophy stiffened.

"Well?" she said.

"Sophy dear! You mustn't take it too seriously. Only--I thought you
ought to know. She's saying it everywhere."

"Saying what?" asked Sophy quietly. "Please go on, Olive."

"She's saying perfectly beastly things about your influence on Cecil.
Trying to put it all on you."

"To put what on me?"

"All his--his queerness. She says you've alienated him from his family.
And...."

Even Olive's g