e Raa was the house was full.

They were about equally divided as to sex and belonged chiefly to my
husband's class, but they included Mr. Eastcliff's beautiful wife,
Camilla, and Alma's mother, who, much to Alma's chagrin, had insisted
upon being invited.

My husband required me to receive them, and I did so, though I was only
their nominal hostess, and they knew it and treated me accordingly.

I should be ashamed to speak of the petty slights they put upon me, how
they consulted Alma in my presence and otherwise wounded my pride as a
woman by showing me that I had lost my own place in my husband's house.

I know there are people of the same class who are kind and considerate,
guileless and pure, the true nobility of their country--women who are
devoted to their homes and children, and men who spend their wealth and
strength for the public good--but my husband's friends were not of that
kind.

They were vain and proud, selfish, self-indulgent, thoroughly insincere,
utterly ill-mannered, shockingly ill-informed, astonishingly
ill-educated (capable of speaking several languages but incapable of
saying a sensible word in any of them), living and flourishing in the
world without religion, without morality, and (if it is not a cant
phrase to use) without God.

What their conduct was when out shooting, picnicking, driving, riding,
motoring, and yachting (for Mr. Eastcliff had arrived in his yacht,
which was lying at anchor in the port below the glen), I do not know,
for "doctor's orders" were Alma's excuse for not asking me to accompany
them.

But at night they played bridge (their most innocent amusement), gambled
and drank, banged the piano, danced "Grizzly Bears," sang duets from the
latest musical comedies, and then ransacked the empty houses of their
idle heads for other means of killing the one enemy of their
existence--Time.

Sometimes they would give entertainments in honour of their dogs, when
all the animals of all the guests (there seemed to be a whole kennel of
them) would be dressed up in coats of silk and satin with pockets and
pocket-handkerchiefs, and then led downstairs to the drawing-room, where
Alma's wheezy spaniel and my husband's peevish terrier were supposed to
receive them.

Sometimes they would give "freak dinners," when the guests themselves
would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the
male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female
the o