Lady Moya Felton possessed that rare combination of talents, beauty and acumen. She dressed well, she spoke well, and she looked well. She was a product of Newnham, an institution which, more often than not, gives the world a being which is something less than a woman and something more than a babu. This being is crammed with erudition and for many years fights life with a textbook. Sometimes she continues to the end, very self-assured, very confident of the facts she has culled from the printed page and very determined that she will never surrender her mechanical facts or her machine-made values. Sometimes, she succumbs to the humanising influences which daily contact with the verities of life bring to her and develops into a useful and charming member of society. Moya had absorbed just as much of life as she thought was necessary to her comfort. She stopped short of the supreme lesson which finds expression in cheerful sacrifice but she was an eminently pleasing person and never discussed biological justice or gave forth as her own the shoddy philosophies she had acquired in hall. Therefore, she was bearable. Moreover, by realising--here her instinct served her--that Newnham had turned her out fit for nothing better than a church-going school ma’am, she conveyed an impression of her education rather than declaimed the fact. Practical as she was, she had a guilty secret, not only a very dear one, to be hugged tight to her heart, but one which evoked the unusual emotion of profound disapproval in the more ordered compartments of her mind. Moya was a dreamer, a cold-blooded romanticist who had wonderful adventures with wonderful people whenever she walked or rode abroad. In the privacy of her big limousine, she would be absorbed in events of her own creation, wholly monopolised by men and women who bore no likeness to and had no relation with any person in her somewhat extensive list of acquaintances. She would often find herself in situations so absurdly impossible that even the penny novelette reader would have rejected them with the scorn which their crudity deserved. She did not dream of living people, the mere mental suggestion--for the roving mind has a trick of taking charge at times--that any of her visionary heroes had his prototype in flesh and blood ensured the ejection of the offending dream-man and the substitution of another, more wildly improbable but at the same time more unlikely to challenge relationship with anybody in the material world. She could dream and yet accept the cold practicality of a Ralph Sapson and calmly consider a marriage so hopelessly prosaic. That was inexplicable.