r lips smiled with pride in her husband's praise; her eyes
glistened with an old regret made new. "He would have been useful
now," she sighed.

"He was the man who laid the keel-blocks of our new navy," said
Davidge. "The thing we haven't got and have got to get is a merchant
marine."

He could talk of that, though he could not celebrate himself. He was
still going strong when the dinner was finished.

Mrs. Prothero clung to the old custom. She took the women away with
her to the drawing-room, leaving the men alone.

Davidge noted that Lady Clifton-Wyatt left the dining-room with a kind
of eagerness, Marie Louise reluctantly. She cast him a look that
seemed to cry "Help!" He wondered what the feud could be that threw
Miss Webling into such apparent panic. He could not tolerate the
thought that she had a yellow streak in her.

CHAPTER VI

Lady Clifton-Wyatt, like many another woman, was kept in order by the
presence of men. She knew that the least charming of attributes in
masculine eyes are the female feline, the gift and art of claws.

Men can be catty, too--tom-catty, yet contemptibly feline when they
are not on their good behavior. There are times when the warning,
"Gentlemen, there are ladies present," restores them to order as
quickly as the entrance of a teacher turns a school-room of young
savages into an assembly of young saints.

The women in Mrs. Prothero's drawing-room could not hear any of the
words the men mixed with their smoke, but they could hear now and then
a muffled explosion of laughter of a quality that indicated what had
provoked it.

The women, too, were relieved of a certain constraint by their
isolation. They seemed to enjoy the release. It was like getting their
minds out of tight corsets. They were not impatient for the men--as
some of the men may have imagined. These women were of an age where
they had something else to think of besides men. They had careers to
make or keep among women as well as the men among men.

The servants kept them on guard till the coffee, tobacco, and liqueurs
were distributed. Then recess was declared. Marie Louise found herself
on a huge tapestried divan provided with deep, soft cushions that held
her like a quicksands. On one side of her was the mountainous Mrs.
Dyckman resembling a stack of cushions cased in silk; on the other was
Mildred Tait Fargeton, whose father had been ambassador to France.

Marie Louise listened to their chatter with