ignoring all that is
equivocal in it, and treating it accordingly.

No one has ever heard Lady Usk admit that there is the slightest
impropriety in the relations of any of her guests: it is one of those
fictions like the convenient fictions of the law, which are so useful
that every one agrees not to dispute their acceptance. She will never
know a person who is really compromised. Therefore, if there be any soil
on the wings of her doves, she shuts her eyes to it so long as those of
the world are shut. She has the agreeable power of never seeing but what
she wishes to see: so, although for the moment she has been
uncomfortably shocked, she recovers her composure rapidly, and persuades
herself that Gervase merely spoke of a passing attachment, perfectly
pure. Why should he not marry the object of it? To the mind of Dorothy
Usk that would make everything right. Things may have been wrong once,
but that is nobody's business. Xenia Sabaroff is a charming and
beautiful woman, and the silver-mine beyond the Urals is a very real
thing. Lady Usk is not a mercenary, she is even a generous woman; but
when English fortunes are so embarrassed as they are in this day, with
Socialists at the roots and a Jacquerie tearing at the fruits of them,
any solid fortune situated out of England would be of great use to any
Englishman occupying a great position.

"We shall all of us have to live abroad before long," she reflects, with
visions of Hodge chopping down her palms for firewood and Sally smashing
the porcelain in her model dairy.

No doubt the relations of her cousin and her guest have not been always
what they ought to have been; but she does not wish to think of this,
and she will not think of it: by-gones are always best buried. The
people who manage to be happy are those who understand the art of
burying them and use plenty of quicklime.

During the twenty years which have elapsed since her presentation, Dolly
Usk has had a very varied experience of men and women, and has
continually been solicited to interfere in their love-affairs, or has
even interfered without being solicited. She likes the feeling of being
a _diva ex machina_ to her friends, and, though she has so decidedly
refused Gervase her assistance to discover the state of Xenia Sabaroff's
feelings towards him, she begins in her own mind immediately to cast
about for some indirect means of learning it, and arranges in her own
fancy the whole story as it will sound p