She made no secret of it to her intimate friends, and no one thought any the worse of her in a society where nearly every one who has need of aids to good looks buys them in Bond Street. Indeed, she was quite unable to understand what she called "the middle class horror of paint." "Why on earth," she would say, "any one can possibly object to an old woman making herself look as pleasant as possible for the last few years of her life, I can't make out. It's a duty one owes to one's friends. It sweetens life. At any rate, _I_ don't intend to go about like old Mother Hubbard or the witch in whatshername." "Lucy, my dear," said this vivacious dame as her niece entered, "you're looking your best this morning. And when you look your best my experience generally tells me that you've been up to some wickedness or other! How's Agatha, and has James Poyntz been at Scarning, and how's that poor dear man, Huddersfield, who always reminds me of a churchwarden? He is the king of all the churchwardens in England, I think." Lucy sat down and endeavoured to answer the flood of questions as satisfactorily as might be, while Lady Linquest took her mid-morning pick-me-up of Liebig and cognac. The good lady gave her niece a rapid _précis_ of the news of their set during the few days she had been away. "So that you'll know," she said, "what to talk about at General Pompe's lunch--your last decent meal, by the way, for a fortnight! I shall give orders to the cook to put a hamper in the carriage for you to take with you to Bernard's. All those poor young men starve themselves." She rattled away thus while Lucy went to her own room to dress. For some reason or other, why she could not exactly divine, she was dissatisfied and ill at ease. The exhilaration of the railway journey, of the wonderful drive through sunlit London, had gone. Her aunt, kind creature as she was, jarred upon her this morning. How terribly shallow the good lady seemed, after all! She was like some gaudy fly dancing over a sunlit brook--or even circling round malodorous farmyard stuff--brilliant, useless, and with nothing inside but the mere muscles of its activity. James Poyntz's words recurred to her, his deep scorn of a purely frivolous, pleasure-loving life was present in her brain. Lucy was genuinely fond of Lady Linquest, but somehow on this bright morning to hear a woman with one foot in the grave talking nothing but scandal and empty catchwords of Vanity Fair, struck with a certain chill to her heart. To see her sitting there, curled, painted, scented, sipping her tonic drink, ready for a smart party of people as empty and useless as herself, was to see a thing that hurt, after the experiences of the morning.