"I only mean that I don't think it matters; you know it doesn't matter; everybody's always doing it." "If you'd only ask some of the women's husbands, some of the men's wives----" "I couldn't do that, dear. I want people to like my house!" "Just as I say--you're so immoral." "No, I'm not. Nobody ever pays a bill for me, except you." "Enviable distinction! Pay! I think I do pay! Though why you can't keep within your pin-money----" "Pin-money means money to buy pins. I did buy two diamond pins with it last year, eight hundred guineas each." "You ought to buy clothes." "Clothes! What an expression! I can't buy a child's frock even; it all goes in little things, and all my own money too; wedding-presents, christening-presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it's all nonsense you're grumbling about my bills to Worth and Elise and Virot; Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which it describes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear and make them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, and their whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they had tortoise-shell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs had jewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is nothing new, though you talk as if it were a crime and we'd invented it!" Usk laughs a little crossly as she comes to the end of her breathless sentences. "_Naso Magister eris_," he remarks, "might certainly be inscribed over the chamber doors of all your friends!" "I know you mean something odious. My friends are all charming people." "I'll tell you what I do mean,--that I don't like the house made a joke of in London; I'll shut it up and go abroad if the thing goes on. If a scandal's begun in town in the season, it always comes down here to carry on; if there are two people fond of each other when they shouldn't be, you always ask 'em down here and make pets of 'em. As you're taking to quoting Ovid, I may as well tell you that in his time the honest women didn't do this sort of thing; they left it to the light-o'-loves under the porticoes." "I really don't know what I've done that I should be called an honest woman! One would think you were speaking to the housemaids! I wish you'd go and stay in somebody else's house: you always spoil things here." "Very sorry. I like my own shooting. Three days here, three days there, three days t'other place, and expected to leave the game behind you and to say 'thanks' if your host gives you a few brace to take away with you,--not for me, if I know it, while there's a bird in the covers at my own places." "I thought you were always bored at home?"