e,
that night that surely lives unique in the memory of Nelson and the
Lions, though most that shared it may be, and doubtless are--for they
were not for various reasons long-lived classes of people--dead and
dust by now. How and why we found ourselves at Trafalgar Square I
could not tell, though I went to the stake for it this minute. But I
think it must have been that Margarita wanted to walk through the
streets, a form of exercise for which she took fitful fancies at odd
times, and that I, as was mostly the case, went with her.

We were all alone, for Roger, who shared our walks usually, when he
was not too busy, had just left for Berlin an hour earlier, on one of
his patient unravellings of Carter's diplomatic tangles.

It had been a dull, damp day--the kind of day that tried Margarita
terribly in England, for she was much under the influence of the
weather, and _le beau temps_ brought out her plumage like her Mexican
parrot in Whistler's portrait. Looking back at it all, too, I seem to
feel, though with no definite reason for it, that she was perturbed
and excited about something known only to herself, for she was
strangely irritable on our walk, contradicted me fiercely, inquired
testily who Nelson might be, then chid me for a dry old schoolmaster,
when I told her, and such like flighty vagaries, inseparable, I
believed, from her sex in general and her temperament in particular.
If I have never taken the trouble to defend myself from the accusation
of thinking The Pearl perfect in her somewhat spoiled relations with
her best friends at this period of her life, it is because I have
always considered that such people as are too inelastic in their views
of human nature to realise that Margarita merely exhibited _les
defauts de ses qualites_ (as who of us does not, at one time or
another?) are unworthy even my argumentative powers, which are not
great, as I perfectly understand.

So she unsheathed her sharp little female claws and patted me
mercilessly with them, and contrived to make me seem to myself a
tactless, blundering fool to her heart's content that night, striding
easily beside me, meanwhile, like a boy, though she had refused to
change her high-heeled bronze slippers for more sensible footgear and
carried the unreasonably long train of her black lace dinner gown
over her arm. Roger did not care for her in black, and she seldom wore
it, but had ordered this a few days ago from the great Worth, who then
ru