ncial expert,
political leader-writer, and diplomatic go-between when Cabinet Ministers
and Empire-builders would arrive at understandings, the serfdom of sex,
the trammels of the petticoat, may have been said to weigh as lightly upon
this thrice-fortunate spinster as though it were no drawback to be a
daughter of Eve.

Oh! prayed Lady Hannah, for the chance of proving that another woman can
equal this brilliant feminine Phoenix! Meanwhile her bright eyes and quick
sense of humour took note of the toilettes of some of her guests, wives
and daughters of notable citizens who had not hurried South at the first
mutterings of the storm. The purple satin worn by the Mayoress tickled her
no less than the unfeigned horror of its wearer when offered from her
hostess's chatelaine cigarette-case the choicest of Sobranies. Lady
Hannah's laugh was the rattling of a mischievous boy's stick across his
sister's piano-wires, and the metallic jangle preceded her assurance that
everybody did it--all women in Society, at least, and you were thought
odd if you didn't. After dinner, in the most exclusive houses, the most
rigid of hostesses invariably allowed their women guests to smoke. They
knew people worth having wouldn't come if they weren't allowed to.

"Never beneath my roof!" gasped the shocked and scandalised wearer of the
purple splendours demanded of the wife of a Chief Magistrate. "Never at my
table!" Of course, the agitated Mayoress went on to say, one had heard of
the doings of the Smart Set. But one had hoped it wasn't true, or, at
least, had been very much exaggerated by "writing-people." The Mayoress,
though a mild woman, had her sting.

Lady Hannah, immensely tickled to find the morals of Bayswater rampant, as
she afterwards expressed it, in the centre of South Africa, cackled as she
helped herself to a second liqueur-glass of Nixey's excellent
apricot-brandy. Small, thin, restless, she presented a parched appearance,
with bright, round, beady eyes continually roving in search of information
from beneath the straggling fringe of a crumpled Pompadour transformation,
for those horrors had recently become fashionable, and the whole world of
women were vying with one another in the simulation of the criminal type
of skull, with the Dolichocephalic Bulge.

"My dear lady, tobacco-ash is an excellent thing for killing moth in
carpets, and Time,--when one is compelled to bestow it upon dull people;
and a perfectly healthy, Noncon