. Where is it?"

She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by
the head of the sofa.

"Do you know him, by the way?" she asked.

"Who?"

"Mr. Barbecue-Smith."

Denis knew of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a name in the Sunday
papers. He wrote about the Conduct of Life. He might even be the author
of "What a Young Girl Ought to Know".

"No, not personally," he said.

"I've invited him for next week-end." She turned over the pages of the
book. "Here's the passage I was thinking of. I marked it. I always mark
the things I like."

Holding the book almost at arm's length, for she was somewhat
long-sighted, and making suitable gestures with her free hand, she began
to read, slowly, dramatically.

"'What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?'"
She looked up from the page with a histrionic movement of the head; her
orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated.
Was it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one of those
Complete Transformations one sees in the advertisements?

"'What are Thrones and Sceptres?'"

The orange Transformation--yes, it must be a Transformation--bobbed up
again.

"'What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful,
what is the pride of the Great, what are the gaudy pleasures of High
Society?'"

The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to
sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed reply.

"'They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin
vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the heart.
Seen things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand times more
significant. It is the unseen that counts in Life.'"

Mrs. Wimbush lowered the book. "Beautiful, isn't it?" she said.

Denis preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non-committal
"H'm."

"Ah, it's a fine book this, a beautiful book," said Priscilla, as she
let the pages flick back, one by one, from under her thumb. "And here's
the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool,
you know." She held up the book again and read. "'A Friend of mine has
a Lotus Pool in his garden. It lies in a little dell embowered with wild
roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours forth its amorous
descant all the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and
the birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its crystal
waters...' Ah, and that rem