“I don’t see why not,” he said obstinately. “Besides—don’t they! A cousin of my own, a girl” (fancy his having a girl-cousin!) “who was staying with us last winter used to wear a magnificent stole and a muff of leopard-skin—the leopards had been shot by her _fiancé_.” “Those were _furs_,” I explained. “Furs are different.” “A great many things would seem to be ‘different’ from what I imagined,” he said, in a tone of voice that was almost petulant. I felt inclined to say, “Yes! _You_ imagined that because you’re as infallible as a tape-machine in business-hours, you can’t make mistakes outside the office!” Whereas Sydney Vandeleur, who has no “business” outside his amateur art criticism, with an occasional design for hand-wrought jewellery, would never have made the _faux pas_ this man had done. It was so absurdly ignorant and _gauche_ of him not to see it. And even now he seemed inclined to dispute the point. “Feathers, now,” he said a little satirically. “Might not a girl wear a couple of really good, expensive ostrich plumes, or whatever you call them—the things that hang down the back like a sort of Niagara of fluff—if they were sent to her by a man with facilities for buying direct from South Africa?” “Oh, yes,” I said readily, feeling as if I were an editress answering “_Queries on Etiquette_.” “Feathers are _quite_ as permissible as furs.” “Even supposing them to be very costly? Worth as much, say, as five times the amount of the rest of the lady’s wardrobe?” “It’s nothing to do with the cost,” I explained patiently. “A twenty-guinea fox stole a girl _might_ accept from a man. A four-pound frock she _couldn’t_.” “I confess I don’t understand these _nuances_,” said Mr. Waters, almost absent-mindedly. I said, “Any _girl_ would.” “Possibly. I can’t help wondering what held good instead of the fur-and-feathers edict in the days when they composed——What I was going to say,” he broke off quickly, “was that I always imagined that young French girls were brought up to be more strict in these matters than English ones. Yet I know a French girl—” (Surprising! He knows a girl!) —“her father’s an old business acquaintance of mine—” (Ah, that explains it.) —“and neither her father nor the young lady seemed to find anything curious about the matter, when, in payment of some bet made at a flying-meeting, I bought her quite a large boxful of pairs of gloves.” “Oh, gloves! Anybody can give gloves to anybody,” I told him. “_Gloves_ aren’t like clothes.” “No, but I see some clothes about nowadays that are uncommonly like gloves!” _Could_ it have been the Governor who muttered this _sotto voce_ to himself? No! It must have been the comment that flashed through my own mind, and that I imagined spoken aloud as the burly policeman whose back I had been studying during this interlude dropped his hand and allowed our taxi to whizz forward into the writhing tangle of traffic.