for the
display of diamonds? Poor little women in their splendid misery! I was
sorry for your _fiancee_, Robert. She was the only woman in the house
without that hateful stamp of worldliness and affectation."

"My dear Drake, you've learned many things, but there's one thing you
have not yet learned--you haven't learned how to take serious things as
trifles, and trifles as serious things. Learn it, my boy, or you'll
embitter existence. You are not going to alter the conditions of
civilization by any change in your own particular life; so just look out
the prettiest, wittiest, wealthiest little woman who is a dummy for the
display of diamonds----"

"Me? Not if I know it, old fellow! Give me a little nature and
simplicity, if it hasn't got a second gown to its back."

"All right--as you like," said Lord Robert, flinging out the end of his
cigarette. "You've got the pull of some of us--you can please yourself.
And here we are at old Bartimaeus's, and this is a very different pair of
shoes!"

They were driving out of one of London's main thoroughfares, through a
groined archway, into one of London's ancient buildings with its quiet
quadrangle where trees grow and birds sing. Every window of the square
was lighted up, and there was a low murmur of music being played within.

"Listen!" said Lord Robert. "I am here ostensibly as the guest of the
visiting physician, don't you know, but really in the interests of the
little friend I told you of."

"The one I got the tickets for last week?"

"Precisely."

At the next moment they were in the ballroom. It was the lecture theatre
for the students of the hospital school--a building detached from the
wards and of circular shape, with a gallery round its walls, which were
festooned with flags and roofed with a glass dome. Some two hundred girls
and as many men were gathered there; the pit was their dancing ring and
the gallery was their withdrawing room. The men were nearly all students
of the medical schools; the girls were nearly all nurses, and they wore
their uniform: There was not one jaded face among them, not one weary
look or tired expression. They were in the fulness of youth and the
height of vigour. The girls laughed with the ring of joy, their eyes
sparkled with the light of happiness, their cheeks glowed with the
freshness of health.

The two men stood a moment and looked on.

"Well, what do you think of it?" said Lord Robert.

Drake's wide eyes were ablaze,