They were halfway through dinner ere Lord Blackborough appeared at the table. To begin with he had wired to his valet for dress clothes, and, accustomed to the routine of good service, had expected to find them in his room. They were not, however, and only by the help of a tearful little Cornish maiden at whom all the racketty job servants from London were swearing profusely as she fled about trying to do everything at once, did he discover his suit-case in the servants' hall, where two lordly _chauffeurs_ accosted him scornfully as some one's belated valet. He escaped from them--and from the cook who, solemnly drunk, was using inconceivable language to the _entrée_ she was dishing up--only to find that his man had forgotten to put the studs in his shirt. Whereupon he also cursed as he broke his finger-nails over the job. And yet all the time at the back of his brain, the thought of Aura lingered, and in the front of it his uncle's face, so foolishly, childishly, helplessly wanting money. What else had the old man expected but chicanery when he dabbled in the Pool. It was nothing but a clutching whirlpool of hands trying to grasp at a golden sovereign in the centre! Every one clutched, he as much as any one. Then with a jar, his mind reverted to the shade of many a tree he had seen in India, where men lived, and apparently lived happily, possessed of nothing but their souls, devoid of all things save the inevitable garment of flesh. The shade of a Bo-tree! This certainly was not it, he thought, as with a smiling apology he slipped into the empty place and found himself in the battle-ground of a heated discussion. A trifle dazzling surely, these lights and flowers and fair women. Helen looked well in white at the head of the table between Mr. Hirsch and Dr. Ramsay; and, thank Heaven! she had left off weepers in the evening. What a difference there was between lace and stiff crimped muslin; and how young she looked. The rapidity of thought is immeasurable, the velocity of its vibration untranslatable in terms of mere human flesh and blood. These thoughts and millions of others suggested by the whole _entourage_ which in a second became part of Ned Blackborough's life-experience, passed into his mind and left him free at once to listen to his cousin's gay-- "Here's Ned! I'll appeal to him! Do you think it fair that we women shouldn't have votes?" "We shall have to settle our terminology first, Helen," he replied in the same tone. "What is fair? I presume what Mrs. Tressilian considers to be right." "_That_ isn't fair if you like," she retorted. "Fair is"--she paused. "Exactly so!" laughed Peter Ramsay. "Is there an outside standard or is there not? That is the question." Mr. Hirsch, who always wore white waistcoats in the evening (they were not so becoming as black ones) answered it. "Of course there is a standard--the general consensus of opinion." "Made up of units?" suggested Dr. Ramsay.