"You’d ruin any decent maid in a month," said Dora shortly, her mouth twisting into curves which always showed displeasure. "It’s a good thing you’re never likely to have one. Felice is paid to wait on me; you aren’t. Don’t talk nonsense, Evelyn. Servants are made for us, not we for servants. If they fall ill they can go, and more fools they, when you think of the wages we give them. Oh"—with a brilliant smile—"isn’t that Mr. Farquharson? Do come here, won’t you? We’ve kept a place for you in this corner. Evelyn, isn’t that Lady Wereminster calling? I wouldn’t keep her waiting if I were you." *CHAPTER IV* "Thou shalt do a deed and abide it."—LEWIS MORRIS. "If I were a younger woman, Richard Farquharson is a man I should fall head over ears in love with," announced Lady Wereminster, pausing at Evelyn’s door on the way to her bedroom. "I mean no disrespect to Wereminster, of course; than whom it would be difficult to conceive a more opposite type. But the man sweeps one off one’s feet, by sheer force of vitality and power. The guileless maiden of my time—it’s a type that no longer exists, my dear; the birth of the twentieth century killed it—would have been vanquished at first sight, and suffered from vapours for a week. I suppose you have taken him under your wing, Evelyn? I noticed his political godfather making overtures to you in a recess. Well, you have a _protégé_ who’ll do you credit this time. Not like some of your lame dogs, who only used their mended limbs to kick you later. No, it’s no use hushing me down, Evelyn. Other people have eyes and ears beside yourself, you know. Don’t you remember making everybody’s life unbearable until you’d secured an important colonial appointment for the husband of some impossible woman who looked like a suffragette and lived in the suburbs? After she’d spent the extra three hundred a year for twelve months or so she began abusing you because you hadn’t got them an appointment in England instead. And there was another woman, who had twins or triplets, or something tiresome and embarrassing. You sold your best lace to provide the unprovided guest with the requirements of decency, and then the mother complained that the things you gave her had been bought at Peter Jones’s instead of Steinmann’s." Evelyn laughed. "Come now, you’re the last person to preach. Your house has always been known to be the refuge of the socially destitute." "One has to pay for one’s title even if it’s an old one," said Lady Wereminster. "It tacks on about thirty per cent. on the price of a yard of ribbon and lessens your income from five hundred a year upwards in charitable demands. But about Richard Farquharson. I believe that man’s made of the right stuff, Evelyn." She laid her hand on the younger woman’s arm with a sudden access of gravity.