With a nod and a light laugh she closed the library door behind her, having apparently forgotten the sadder events of the visit. But in her basket she had the diary. CHAPTER XVIII LIKE SHIPS UPON THE SEA Be as one that knoweth, and yet holdeth his tongue. “And, of course, you know every one in the room?” Dora was saying to her cousin as the orchestra struck suddenly into “God bless the Prince of Wales.” “Good gracious, no!” Miss Mazerod replied; and both young ladies stood up to curtsey to the Royal party. It was the great artistic _soirée_ of the year, and crowds of nobodies jostled each other in their mad desire to deceive whosoever might be credulous into the belief that they were somebodies. “Of course,” said Dora, when they were seated again, and the strains of the Welsh air had been suppressed “by desire,” “they may be very great swells; I have no doubt they are in their particular way; but they do not look it.” Miss Mazerod looked round critically. “Some of them,” she said, “are frame-makers, a good many of them, with big bills in high places. Others are actresses--very great actresses off the stage. Do you see that tall girl there, with a supercilious expression which she does not know is apt to remind one of a housemaid scorning a milkman's love on the area steps? She is a great actress, who will not take small engagements, and is not offered large ones. She is an actress 'pour se faire photographier.'” “And this is the cream of London society?” said Dora, looking round her with considerable amusement. “Society,” returned her cousin, “is not allowed to stand for cream now. It is stirred up with a spoon, silver-gilt, and the skim milk gets hopelessly mixed up with the cream. That young man who is now talking to the actress person is not what he looks. He is, as a matter of fact, the scion of a noble house, who models in clay atrociously.” “And the gorgeous person he is turning his back upon?” “One of his models.” “Of clay?” “Essentially so.” And Miss Mazerod broke off into a happy laugh. Hers was not the bitterness of plainness or insignificance, but something infinitely more suggestive. It was, indeed, not bitterness at all, but light-hearted contempt, which is, perhaps, the deepest contempt there is. “Who is the wretched woman with no backbone draped in rusty black?” asked Dora. “My dear! That is one of the great lady artists of the age. She lectures to factory girls or something, and she paints limp females snuffling over tiger-lilies. Her ideal woman has that sort of droop of the throat--I imagine she-tries to teach it to the factory. She objects to backbone.” Miss Mazerod, who possessed a very firm little specimen of the adjunct mentioned, drew herself up and smiled commiseratingly. “Then,” said Dora, “I feel quite consoled about my sketches.” For the first time Miss Mazerod looked serious.