Lord Ingleton, assuring Mrs. Halliday that immorality was
really only shortsightedness. Lady Dolly, in front, repeated Lord
Ingleton's phrase with ingenuous wonder. "I know it's clever," she
insisted, "but what does it mean? Now that other thing--what was
it?--'Subtract vice, and virtue is what is left'--that's an easy one.
Write it down on your cuff for me, will you, Colonel Cummins? I _shall_
be so sick if I forget it."

Stephen was perhaps the only person in the box quite oblivious of Lady
Dolly. He looked steadily over her animated shoulders at the play,
wholly involved in an effort which the author would doubtless have
resented, to keep its current and direction through the floating debris
of constrained sayings with which it was encumbered, to know in advance
whither it was carrying its Mrs. Halliday, and how far Lord Ingleton
would accompany. When Lord Ingleton paused, as it were, to beg four
people to "have nothing to do with sentiment--it so often leads to
conviction," and the house murmured its amusement, Arnold shifted his
shoulders impatiently. "How inconsistent," Lord Ingleton reproached Mrs.
Halliday a moment later, "to wear gloves on your hands and let your
thoughts go candid." Arnold turned to Duff. "There's no excuse for
that," he said, but Lindsay was hanging upon Hilda's rejoinder and did
not hear him.

At the end of the first act, where, after introducing Mrs. Halliday to
her husband's divorced first wife, Lord Ingleton is left rubbing his
hands with gratification at having made two such clever women "aware of
each other," Stephen found himself absolutely unwilling to discuss the
piece with the rest of the party. As he left the box to walk up and down
the corridor outside where it was cooler, he heard the voice of Colonel
Cummins lifted in further quotation: "'To be good _and_ charming--what a
sinful superfluity!' I'm sure nobody ever called you superfluous, Lady
Dolly," and was vividly aware of the advisability of taking himself and
his Order out of the theatre. He had not been gratified, or even from
any point appealed to. Hilda's production of Mrs. Halliday was so
perfect that it failed absolutely to touch him, almost to interest him.
He had no means of measuring or of valuing that kind of woman, the
restless brilliant type that lives upon its emotions and tilts at the
problems of its sex with a curious comfort in the joust. He was too far
from the circle of her modern influence to consider her w