s womankind. The extraordinary thing was the
marvellous resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to
Lady Holme's, even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her
little mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but
turned towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious
impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman
of the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the
imitation. As it was, her many friends in the house noticed it, and
during the short progress of the scene various heads were turned in her
direction, various faces glanced up at the big box in which she sat,
leaning one arm on the ledge, and looking towards Miss Schley with an
expression of quiet observation--a little indifferent--on her white
face. Even Sir Donald, who was next to her, and who once--in the most
definite moment of Miss Schley's ingenious travesty--looked at her for
an instant, could not discern that she was aware of what was amusing or
enraging all her acquaintances.

Naturally she had grasped the situation at once, had discovered at once
why Miss Schley was anxious for her to be there. As she sat in the
box looking on at this gross impertinence, she seemed to herself to be
watching herself after a long _degringolade_, which had brought her, not
to the gutter, but to the smart restaurant, the smart music-hall,
the smart night club; the smart everything else that is beyond the
borderland of even a lax society. This was Miss Schley's comment upon
her. The sting of it lay in this fact, that it followed immediately
upon the heels of the unpleasant scene at Arkell House. Otherwise, she
thought it would not have troubled her. Now it did trouble her. She felt
not only indignant with Miss Schley. She felt also secretly distressed
in a more subtle way. Miss Schley's performance was calculated, coming
at this moment, to make her world doubtful just when it had been turned
from doubt. A good caricature fixes the attention upon the oddities, or
the absurdities, latent in the original. But this caricature did more.
It suggested hidden possibilities which she, by her own indiscreet
action at the ball, had made perhaps to seem probabilities to many
people.

Here, before her friends, was set a woman strangely like her, but
evidently a bad woman. Lady Holme was certain that the result of Miss
Schley's performance would be that were she to do things now which, d