"Come, you're polite to my wife," said Frank. "This is flat blasphemy against the state into which we've just entered." "Oh, pray don't let the conversation, evidently so genial, be stopped on my account. I'm tired, and am just going;" and with a sweeping bow Barbara sailed out of the room. An hour afterwards, when Frank looked in from his dressing-room, he saw in the dim light Barbara's hair streaming over the pillow, and going to her found traces of tears on her cheeks. Tenderly and eagerly he asked her what had happened. "Oh, Frank, Frank!" she exclaimed, bursting into fresh sobs; "I see it all now! What those horrid men said is too true! We were worse than mad to marry. Your friends will never understand me, while I shall interfere with your work and your pleasure; and, oh! I am so very, very miserable myself!" CHAPTER XXI. THE FLYBYNIGHTS. To such of womankind as knew of its existence there were few places in London so thoroughly unpopular as the Flybynights Club. And yet it was an unpretending little room, boasting none of the luxury of decoration generally associated in the female mind with notions of club-life, and offering no inducement for membership save that it was open at very abnormal hours, and that it was very select. The necessary qualification for candidature was that you should be somebody; no matter what your profession (provided, of course, that you were a gentleman by position), you must have made some mark in it, shown yourself ahead of the ruck of competitors, before you could have been welcome among the Flybynights. Two or three leading advocates, attached for the most part to the criminal bar; half-a-dozen landscape and figure painters of renown; half-a-dozen actors; a sporting man or two, with the power of talking about something else besides Brother to Bluenose's performances; two or three City men, who combined the most thorough business habits with convivial tastes in the "off" hours; a few members of Parliament, who were compelled to respect the room as a thoroughly neutral ground; a few journalists and authors, and a sprinkling of nothing-doing men about town,--formed the corporate body of the club. What was its origin? I believe that certain members of the Haresfoot Club, finding that establishment scarcely so convivial as report had led them to believe; that the _Dii majores_ of the house were a few snuffy old gentlemen, without an idea beyond the assertion of their own dignity and the keeping up of some dreary fictions and time-worn conventionalities; that the delights of the smoking-room, so much talked of in the outer world, in reality consisted in sitting between a talkative barrister and a silent stockbroker, or listening to the complaints against the management of the club by the committee; finding, in fact, that the place was dull, bethought them of establishing another where they could be more amused. Hence the Flybynights.