It was one evening shortly after I had lunched with Mrs. W. that Barfleur and I dined with Miss E., the young actress who had come over on the steamer with us. It was interesting to find her in her own rather smart London quarters surrounded by maid and cook, and with male figures of the usual ornamental sort in the immediate background. One of them was a ruddy, handsome, slightly corpulent French count of manners the pink of perfection. He looked for all the world like the French counts introduced into American musical comedy,--just the right type of collar about his neck, the perfect shoe, the close-fitting, well-tailored suit, the mustachios and hair barbered to the last touch. He was charming, too, in his easy, gracious aloofness, saying only the few things that would be of momentary interest and pressing nothing. Miss E. had prepared an appetizing luncheon. She had managed to collect a group of interesting people--a Mr. T., for instance, whose _bête noire_ was clergymen and who stood prepared by collected newspaper clippings and court proceedings, gathered over a period of years, to prove that all ecclesiastics were scoundrels. He had, as he insisted, amazing data, showing that the most perverted of all English criminals were usually sons of bishops and that the higher you rose in the scale of hieratic authority the worse were the men in charge. The delightful part of it all was the man’s profound seriousness of manner, a thin, magnetic, albeit candle-waxy type of person of about sixty-five who had the force and enthusiasm of a boy. “Ah, yes,” you would hear him exclaim often during lunch, “I know him well. A greater scoundrel never lived. His father is bishop of Wimbledon”--or, for variation--“his father was once rector of Christ Church, Mayfair.” There was a thin, hard, literary lady present, of the obviously and militantly virgin type. She was at the foot of the table, next to the count, but we fell into a discussion of the English woman’s-suffrage activity under his very nose, the while he talked lightly to Barfleur. She was for more freedom for women, politically and otherwise, in order that they might accomplish certain social reforms. You know the type. How like a sympathetic actress, I thought, to pick a lady of this character to associate with! One always finds these opposing types together. The thing that interested me was to see this charming little actress keeping up as smart a social form as her means would permit and still hoping after years of effort and considerable success to be taken up and made much of. She could not have been made to believe that society, in its last reaches, is composed of dullness and heaviness of soul, which responds to no schools of the unconventional or the immoral and knows neither flights of fancy nor delicacy and tenderness of emotion.