ions that I should be friendly with little Miss F.
who lives over the tobacconist's at the corner of such and such a street,
though she _is_ thoroughly congenial to me, and I love her plucky and
cheery outlook on life." She stopped.

"Go on," encouraged Doctor Hilary.

"Well," laughed Trix, "take a more extreme case. Sir A. C. is--well, not
a bad man, but not the least the kind of man I care about, but he may
take me in to dinner, and, on the strength of that brief acquaintance, to
a theatre if he wants, provided I have some other woman with me as a sort
of chaperon, and he can talk to me by the hour, and that all on account
of his money and title. Mr. Z. is a really white man, but he's a
'come-down,' through no fault of his own, and a bus-conductor. I happen
to have spoken to him once or twice; and like him. But I mightn't even
walk for half an hour with him in the park, if I'd fifty authorized
chaperons attending on me. That's what I mean about conventions that are
conventions for their own sake." She stopped again.

"And what do you suggest as a remedy?" asked Father Dormer, smiling.

"There isn't one," sighed Trix. "At least not one you can apply
universally. Everybody must just apply it for themselves, and not exactly
by defying conventions, but by treating them as simply non-existent."

The Duchessa made a little movement in the moonlight.

"Which," she said quietly, "comes to exactly the same thing as defying
them, and it won't work."

"Why not?" demanded Trix.

"You'd find yourself curiously lonely after a time if you did."

"You mean my friends--no, my acquaintances--would desert me?"

"Probably."

"Well, I'd have the one I'd chanced it all for."

"Yes," said the Duchessa slowly and deliberately, "but you'd have to be
very sure, not only that the friend was worth it, but that you were worth
it to the friend."

There was rather a blank silence. Trix gave a little gasp. It was not so
much the words that hurt, as the tone in which they had been spoken. It
was a repetition of the little scene at dinner, but this time
intensified. And it was so utterly, so entirely unlike Pia. Trix felt
miserably squashed. She had been talking a good deal too, perhaps,
indeed, rather foolishly, that was the worst of it. No doubt she _had_
made rather an idiot of herself. She swallowed a little lump in her
throat. Well, anyhow that inflection in Pia's tone must be covered at
once. That was the first, indeed the only, c