e minister, as, side by side, they disappeared through the dining-room
door. 'Why _does_ Laura have her?'

'Well, she's immensely intelligent, they _say_,' he sighed.

'That's why I wonder,' laughed Vida. '_We_ are rather frivolous, I'm
afraid.'

'To tell the truth, I wondered, too. I even sounded my sister-in-law.'

'Well?'

'She said it was her Day of Reckoning. "I never ask the woman," she
said, "except to a scratch party like this."'

'"Scratch party"--with you and me here!'

'Ah, we are the leaven. We make the compound possible.'

'Still, I don't think she ought to call it "scratch" when she's got an
Ambassador and a Cabinet Minister----'

'Just the party to ask a scratch Cabinet Minister to,' he insisted,
stopping between the two cards inscribed respectively with their names.
'As for the Ambassador, he's an old friend of ours--knows his London
well--knows we are the most tolerant society on the face of the earth.'

In spite of her companion's affectation of a smiling quarrelsomeness,
Vida unfolded her table-napkin with the air of one looking forward to
her _tete-a-tete_ with the man who had brought her down. But Lord
Borrodaile was a person most women liked talking to, and hardly had she
begun to relish that combination in the man of careless pleasantry and
pungent criticism, when Vida caught an agonized glance from her hostess,
which said plainly, 'Rescue the man on your right,'--and lo! Miss
Levering became aware that already, before the poor jaded politician had
swallowed his soup, Mrs. Townley had fallen to catechising him about the
new Bill--a theme talked threadbare by newspaperdom and all political
England. But Mrs. Townley, albeit not exactly old, was one of those
old-fashioned women who take what used to be called 'an intelligent
interest in politics.' You may pick her out in any drawing-room from the
fact that politicians shun her like the plague. Rich, childless, lonely,
with more wits than occupation, practically shelved at a time when her
intellectual life is most alert--the Mrs. Townleys of the world do, it
must be admitted, labour under the delusion that men fighting the battle
of public life, go out to dine for the express purpose of telling the
intelligent female 'all about it.' She is a staunch believer not so much
in women's influence as in woman's. And there is no doubt in her mind
which woman's. If among her smart relations who ask her to their houses
and go to hers (from that senti