. I don't wear the garment of respectability,
but then I'm not stark naked. Every man clothes himself in some
article of faith, virtue if you like." The name of Sally and Sally's
face swept across his mind. There was one virtue at least which he
could put on. "You people, the set you want me to join, the hunting
set, the country house set--all you wear--I don't mean you
particularly. God! If you were like that!" He was too intent upon
what he was saying to notice the smile of ice that twisted her pretty
lips. "All you wear is the big, comprehensive cloak of respectability,
and sometimes you're not particular whether that's tied up
properly."

Dolly broke into low laughter. "If you'd come down to Apsley," she
said, "one week end, I'd get a certain number of people down there,
and when they are all congregated in the drawing-room after dinner,
you could stand with your back to the fire, command the whole room
and, at a signal from me, make that speech. You'd be the lion of the
evening."

"What does being the lion of the evening mean?" he asked, with the
ironical turn of the lip. "That your bedroom door is liable to open,
I suppose, and admit whatever lady is most hampered in the way of
debts."

"Jack!" She sat upright in the chair she had taken, eyes well lit
with a forced blaze, breath cunningly driven through the nostrils.

"What?"

"How dare you talk to me like that?"

"Don't know," he replied, imperturbably. "It is daring, I suppose,
seeing that I'm not one of you. You'd listen to that on the hunting
field from a man whom you'd met once before. But it was daring of
me; I'm only your brother, and not in the crew at that."

Her eyes glittered more vividly, the breath came quicker still. Then
it all blew away like sea-froth, and she shook with charming
laughter.

"You talk like a Jesuit," she said. "Do you really feel those things
as keenly as that?"

"Me?" He laughed with her and went for his pipe. "I don't feel them
at all. What's there to feel about in them? I only want to show you
that I'm not totally ignorant of what your set is like, the set you
want me to become a lion-of-the-evening in. Lion-of-the-evening,
beautiful lion, eh? Have a cigarette?"

"Thanks. Then why are you so hard on us?"

"Hard! I'm not hard." He lit a match for her, watched by the light
of it her lineless face, deftly made up with its powder and its dust
of rouge, the eyebrows cunningly pencilled, the lashes touched with
black.