backs escaping from the big towns, and sometimes
they helped these young men over dreary stretches of road.

'The happiest six days of my life,' said Verschoyle, as they approached
the mountains. 'I haven't toured in England before. Somehow in London
one knows nothing of England. One is bored and one goes over to
Homburg or Aix-les-bains. How narrow life is even with a car and a
yacht!'

How narrow life could be Clara soon discovered at the Butchers', where
London life was simply continued in a lovely valley at the bottom of
which lay a little lake shining like a mirror and vividly reflecting
the hills above it.

The Butchers had a long, low house in an exquisite garden, theatrically
arranged so that the flowers looked as if they were painted and the
trees had no roots, but were as though clamped and ironed to the earth.
From their garden the very hills had the semblance of a back-cloth.

The house was full of the elegant young men and women who ran in and
out of the theatre and had no compunction about interrupting even
rehearsals. They chaffed Sir Henry, and fed Lady Butcher with scandal
for the pleasure of hearing her say witty biting things, which, as she
had no mercy, came easily to her lips. She studiously treated Clara as
though she were part and parcel of Verschoyle, and to be accommodated
like his car or his chauffeur.... Except as a social asset, Lady
Butcher detested the theatre, and she loathed actresses.

As the days floated by--for once in a way the weather in Westmoreland
was delicious--it became apparent to Clara that Lady Butcher hated the
project of Charles's production of _The Tempest_. She never missed an
opportunity of stabbing at him with her tongue. She regarded him as a
vagabond.

Living herself in a very close and narrow set, she respected cliques
more than persons. Verschoyle was rich enough to live outside a
clique, but that a man with a career to make should live and work alone
was in her eyes a kind of blasphemy. As for Clara--Lady Butcher
thought of her as a minx, a designing actress, one of the many who had
attempted to divert Sir Henry from the social to the professional
aspect of the theatre, which, in few words, Lady Butcher regarded as
her own, a kind of salon which gave her a unique advantage over her
rivals in the competition of London's hostessry.

It was the more annoying to Lady Butcher that Clara and Verschoyle
should turn up when they did as two Cabinet Minist