"If women do not make a stumbling-block for you, John, you will go far," he said as he buttered his toast. "Women!" quoth John Derringham, and he laughed incredulously. "They matter no more to me than the flowers in the garden--enchanting in the summer time, a mere pleasure for sight and touch, but to make or mar a man's life!--not even to be considered as factors in the scheme of things." "I am glad to hear you say so," said Mr. Carlyon dryly. "And I hope that jade, Fate, won't play you any tricks." John Derringham smiled. "I admit that a woman with money may be useful to me by and by," he said, "because, as you know, I am always hard up, and presently when I want to occupy a larger sphere I shall require money for my ends, but for the time being they serve to divert me as a relaxation; that is all." "You are contracting no ties, dear lad?" asked the Professor with one eyebrow raised, while he shook back his silvery hair. "I had heard vaguely about your attention to Lady Durrend, but I understand she has had many preliminary canters and knows the ropes." John Derringham smiled. "Vivienne Durrend is a most charming woman," he said. "She has taught me a number of things in the last two years. I am grateful to her. Next season she is bringing a daughter out--and she has a wonderful sense of the fitness of things." Then he sipped his tea and got up and strolled towards the windows. "Besides," he continued, "I do not admit there are any ties to be contracted. The Greeks understood the place of women; all this nonsense of vows of fidelity and exaltation of sentiment in the home cramps a man's ambitions. It is perfectly natural that he should take a wife if his position calls for it, because the society in which we move has made a figurehead of that kind necessary. But that a woman should expect a man to be faithful to her, be she wife or mistress, is contrary to all nature." "We have put nature out of the running now for a couple of thousand years," Mr. Carlyon announced sententiously; "we have set up a standard of impossibilities and worship hypocrisy and can no longer see any truth. You have got to reckon with things as they are, not with what nature meant them to be." "Then you think women are a force now which one must consider?" "I think they are as deadly as the deep sea--" and Mr. Carlyon's voice was tense. "When they have only bodies they are dangerous enough, but when--as many of the modern ones have--they combine a modicum of mind as well, with all the cunning Satan originally endowed them with--then happy is the man who escapes, even partially whole, from their claws." "Whew--" whistled John Derringham, "and what if they have souls? Not that I personally admit that such a case exists--what then?" "When you meet a woman with a soul you will have met your match, John," the Professor said, and opening his _Times_, which Demetrius had brought in with the second post, he closed the conversation.