epsia and with doctors, who keep
their carriages on our indigestion and make fifty thousand a year each
out of it."

Usk allowed that the reason was excellent; but then the renunciation
involved was too enormous.

CHAPTER III.

Let it not for an instant be supposed that the guests of Surrenden are
people looked in the least coldly or shyly on by society. Not they. They
go to drawing-rooms, which means nothing; they are invited to state
balls and state concerts, which means much. They are among the most
eminent leaders of that world of fashion which has of late
revolutionized taste, temper, and society in England. Mrs. Wentworth
Curzon sails a little near the wind, perhaps because she is careless,
and now and then Lady Dawlish has been "talked about," because she has a
vast number of debts and a lord who occasionally makes scenes; but, with
these exceptions, all these ladies are as safe on their pedestals as if
they were marble statues of chastity. That their tastes are studied and
their men asked to meet them everywhere is only a matter of delicate
attention, like the bouquets which the housekeeper sets out in their
bedrooms and the new novels which are laid on their writing-tables.

"I like my house to be pleasant," says Dorothy Usk, and she does not
look any further than that: as for people's affairs, she is not supposed
to know anything about them. She knows well enough that Iona would not
come to her unless she had asked the Marquise de Caillac, and she is
fully aware that Lawrence Hamilton would never bestow the cachet of his
illustrious presence on Surrenden unless Mrs. Wentworth Curzon brought
thither her _fourgons_, her maids, her collie dog, her famous emeralds,
and her no less famous fans. Of course she knows that, but she is not
supposed to know it. Nobody except her husband would be so ill-bred as
to suggest that she did know it; and if any of her people should ever by
any mischance forget their tact and stumble into the newspapers, or
become notorious by any other accident, she will drop them, and nobody
will be more surprised at the discovery of their naughtiness than
herself. Yet she is a kind woman, a virtuous woman, a very warm friend,
and not more insincere in her friendships than any one else; she is only
a hostess of the last lustre of the nineteenth century, a woman who
knows her London and follows it in all its amazing and illimitable
condonations as in its eccentric and exceptional sev