“A cycling skirt always makes a girl look coarse,” Edred murmured critically. Pamela gave him a pleased glance; she loved to hear him depreciate Nancy. “Oh! do come and play!” cried the girl, addressing herself pointedly to Edred. “We are making up a fresh set. Croquet is such fun.” Pamela, the thin stream of gall flowing from her heart, saw him return Nancy’s pleading, babyish glance tenderly. She turned away. She took Aunt Sophy’s effusive kiss without a word, only assuring her that she hadn’t a headache. Egbert Turle, who had left Cambridge and was walking the hospital, nodded with patronage from his post by the tennis-net. He came dutifully to Turle every week. Mrs. Clutton ran along the grass in her careless gown. “Come and sit under the elms with me,” she said. There were several ladies under the elms, in green wooden chairs with sloping backs. They had not come to play tennis or croquet; their sole aim was to talk scandal, snub people in the set a shade beneath their own, and drink astringent tea. They wore long skirts and elaborate light wraps, as distinguished from the athletic women a few paces off, who were running about and screaming to each other in the sun. The earnest topic of the moment turned out to be false hair. Mrs. McAlpine had confessed to an increasing thinness on the left temple. Her doctor told her that she used the right side of the brain too much--and darkly hinted that she must go up to Lechaux--a hairdresser recommended by the ladies’ paper--and get a front. Annie Jayne cried out in earnest horror: “Oh, don’t! My mother never wore false hair in her life. She took to caps when she was thirty-five. I shall take to caps myself in a year or two--they look matronly.” “But no one wears caps nowadays,” cried Mrs. Clutton tersely. “Women buy false hair instead of lace. If, since the creation, each woman had done just as her mother did, fig-leaves would still be the height of fashion.” Mrs. McAlpine, who had the greatest contempt for the journalist’s wife--_she_ was a J. P.’s daughter and the widow of a Government official--broke out in her languidly genteel voice: “I was afraid I should have been prevented from coming, dear Mrs. Turle. One can’t possibly attend a garden-party in a coat and skirt”; she looked complacently at her embroidered bodice, “and my lost box only turned up last night.” The face of every lady immediately became solemnly sympathetic. “I told you all about it, didn’t I? I’d been visiting at Warne--taking my best things, of course. The things, you know”--she gave a quick glance of her narrow eyes at Mrs. Clutton--“that one takes with one on a visit at a house where they are--well, rather particular. Dear Laura entertains so largely at Warne.” One or two ladies on the edge of the second-best set looked at her with reverential alarm. Here was a person who visited on such positively equal terms at Warne, the biggest seat for miles round, that she called the hostess by her Christian name!