ntiments sounded so
comic, expressing themselves in his squeaky voice, I could not help
smiling. He became radiant. He did not guess in the least what amused
me.

Although the salon is immense, the ten or twelve women all crowded
around the fireplace. It was a damp, chilly evening.

They all seemed to know one another very well, and called each other
by their Christian names, so until Babykins again gave me some
information I did not realize who people were.

The purple lady is Lady Grenellen; her husband is at the war. She is
most attractive. She sat on a big sofa and smoked cigarettes rapidly
in a little amber holder. She must have got through at least three or
four of them before the men came in.

Lady Tilchester and two other women were deep in South-African news,
the rest talked about books and their clothes, but Babykins and
Letitia exchanged views upon the scandal of the time.

"In my day," Letitia said, "it sometimes happened that men made love
and ran away with a woman because they found they liked her better
than anything else in the world. It was a great sin, but their passion
was mixed with respect, and the elopement constituted the wedding
ceremony. Now you remain on at home until you are found out, and then
the husband takes a gratuity and the matter is hushed up, and probably
the lover passes on to your best friend, an added feather in his cap."

"Dear Lady Lambourne, how severe you are!" chirped Babykins.
"And you really should not use that little word 'you.' Of course,
you don't mean any of us, but it sounds unkind and might be
misunderstood--especially," she added, in a whisper to me, "as that
is the exact case of Cordelia Grenellen."

Letitia (Lady Lambourne) has a distinct voice and decided opinions.
She continued, as though no interruption had taken place:

"If the matter was only for love, too, I should still have nothing
to say; but it is so often for a string of pearls, or some new
carriage-horses."

"But, surely, it is more logical to have that reason than no reason at
all, like the case of your poor cousin. I understood that was sheer
foolishness, and Lord Edam did not even pretend to care for her."

Lady Lambourne looked daggers and remained speechless. "What
scandalous things you are all saying," laughed Lady Grenellen from her
sofa. "Letitia, you are sitting there and being epigrammatic, just
like the people in those unreal society plays they had last year. We
are all perfectly