ren, yes! Lawyers--no! Members of Parliament--certainly
not! Women were made for one thing and to do that properly should take
all the energy they possess."

"You are full of surprises," Tallente declared. "I expected a miracle
of complexity and I find you almost primitive." She laughed. "Then
considering the sort of man you are, I ought to have gone up a lot in
your estimation."

"There are a very few higher notches," he assured her, smiling, "than
the one where you now sit enthroned."

Nora glanced at her wrist watch.

"Susan dear, what time do you have to join your friends?" she asked.

Susan shook her head.

"Nothing doing. I've got my seat. I am going when I've had my dinner
comfortably. There's fried chicken coming and no considerations of
friendship would induce me to hurry away from it."

Nora sighed plaintively.

"There is no doubt about it, women do lack the sporting instinct," she
lamented. "Now if we'd both been men, and Mr. Tallente a charming
woman, I should have just given you a wink, you would have muttered
something clumsy about an appointment, shuffled off and finished your
dinner elsewhere."

"Our sex isn't capable of such sacrifices," Susan declared, leaning back
to enable the waiter to fill her glass. "There's the champagne, too."

The meal came to a conclusion with scarcely another serious word. Susan
departed in due course, and Tallente called for his bill, a short time
afterwards, with a feeling of absolute reluctance.

"Shall we try and get in at a show somewhere?" he suggested.

She shook her head.

"Not to-night. Four nights a week I go to bed early and this is one of
them. Let's escape, if we can, before Mr. Miller can make his way over
here. I know he'll try and have coffee with us or something."

Tallente was adroit and they left the restaurant just as Miller was
rising to his feet. Nora sprang into the waiting taxi with a little
laugh of triumph and drew her skirts on one side to make room for her
escort. They drove slowly off along the hot and crowded street, with
its long-drawn-out tangle of polyglot shops, foreign-looking restaurants
and delicatessen establishments. Every one who was not feverishly busy
was seated either at the open windows of the second or third floor, or
out on the pavement below. The city seemed to be exuding the soaked-in
heat of the long summer's day. The women who floated by were dressed in
the lightest of muslins; even the plainest of them gained