"I should think not. Mr. Symeon is thrilling. To know him is like what it must have been to be intimate with Simon Forman or Dr. Dee. I would give worlds to belong to his society. It is quite the smart thing to do. The members give themselves no end of airs in a quiet way." Lady Susan would have stood in the doorway talking in her crisp and rapid way for a quarter of an hour, oblivious of the people in the drawing-room; but Vera slipped a hand through her arm, and they went downstairs together, Susan talking all the way. "Fanny Ransom has just come in, with her girl--not out yet, but ages old in knowing what she oughtn't to know. How can a woman like Fanny, eaten up with spiritualism, look after a daughter? They say she went to Paris last winter on purpose to attend a Black Mass." "The not-out daughter?" asked Claude. "No, the mother; but she told the girl all about it, and the minx raves about the devil--and says she would rather be initiated than presented next year." "Lady Fanny had better take care, or she will be expelled from Us. I don't think Symeon would approve of the Black Mass. His philosophy is all light. Light and darkness are his good and evil." Claude spoke in an undertone, as they were in the room by this time, but he ran small risk of being overheard in a place where everybody seemed to be talking and nobody listening. Lady Fanny was the centre of a group, her large brown eyes flashing, her voice the loudest, a tall, commanding figure in a black and gold gown, and a black beaver hat with long ostrich feathers and a diamond buckle, a hat that suggested Rupert of the Rhine rather than a modern matron. Her girl stood a little way off, with three other not-outs, listening to her mother's "balderdash" with unsuppressed mockery. "Isn't she too killing?" this dutiful child exclaimed, in a rapture of contemptuous amusement, and then she and her satellites bounced down upon the most luxurious ottoman within reach, and employed themselves in disparaging criticism of the company generally--their dress, demeanour, and social status, with much whispering and giggling--happily unobserved by grown-ups, who all had their own interesting subjects to talk about.