castle, whereupon the
millionaire smiled, and remarked:

"I fear that I've not been there lately. I am so very seldom in
England nowadays. Besides, the old place is so cold and gloomy. It is
draughty even on a summer's day. My wife liked it when we were
married--liked it until somebody told her of a family legend, how Hugh
de Weymount, in the fifteenth century, walled up his wife in the north
tower and left her to starve to death. Ever since she heard that story
she has hated the old place. But," he added with a hard laugh, "it is
most probably not true, and if the gallant knight actually did such a
thing, perhaps, after all, the lady deserved it!"

My friend certainly seemed soured against the opposite sex. And surely
he had just cause to be if his wife, in order to spite him, had
deliberately lost the heir, little Oswald De Gex, in Westbourne Grove.

It was a strange thing that the heir of one of the wealthiest men in
Britain should have been abandoned in Bayswater. As a bachelor, I
wondered as to the state of mind of the mother--a mother who could
take out her child on a winter's night, without hat or coat, and
deliberately cast him adrift just to annoy her husband.

But the gentler sex in these days of drugs and dancing are, it must be
admitted, strangely abnormal. Women with crazes abound everywhere.
That women are emancipated from the almost Oriental thraldom in which
they lived in the days of Victoria the Good is a bright sign of our
times--the times of discovery, refinement, and mutual happiness of all
classes. But certain circles--those circles wherein women take drugs
to enable them to dance the better, circles where opium is smoked, and
where morals do not count, where religion is scoffed at and relegated
to the limbo of an out-of-date fiction, and where only the possessor
of money counts, there is a strange and mysterious phase of Society
indescribable by the pen. Only those who know of them by personal
experience--the experience of "fast living"--can understand it. And
even the man-about-town stands aghast at the ultra-modern crazes.

As we sat chatting in that quiet comfortable room, I confess that I
became rather fascinated by my host. Perhaps he was a trifle too
cynical at times, but his matrimonial trouble no doubt accounted for
it.

Suddenly he rose and stretched himself rather wearily, I thought. The
thin, delicate hand which held his cigar was long and tapering, and
upon his finger was an ant