NEW LAMPS FOR OLD DURING the next few days a thing happened that surprised everyone. Sir Bernard Vanbrugh and Lord Alistair became great friends. Alistair had motives that were plain enough to three members of the little party for his goodwill towards Hero’s father. But it puzzled the two women to account for the pleasure which Sir Bernard evidently found in the society of the young man. To the Duchess the development did not bring unmixed satisfaction. Her own acquaintance with the scientist had begun with some secret trepidation on her part. She knew that Vanbrugh held opinions which she had been accustomed to hear described in the venomous language of her creed as infidelity, and which she had been taught to attribute to moral perversity rather than to mental aberration. Such a man was not the father-in-law she would have chosen for her son, though she had resigned herself to the relationship as an inevitable evil, the flaw inseparable from all human arrangements. While it pleased her to see that he liked Alistair, she watched with secret uneasiness Alistair’s unaffected liking for him. To Vanbrugh the young man presented himself as an intelligent companion, a rare exception among the crowd of contemporary youths with minds ranging from bridge to polo, and from horses to ballet-girls. It could not have occurred to him in any case that the Duke of Trent’s brother was a probable aspirant to the prize which the Duke had failed to gain, and, in fact, his mind was so thoroughly armed against the possibility of Lord Alistair as a son-in-law that he never thought of him in any such connection. He spoke of him freely to Hero, as he might have spoken of a character in some play which they had both seen. “I like that scapegrace because he is so sincere,” he confided to her one evening after Stuart had left them. “He never seems to have acquired the habit of hypocrisy. I suppose it is because he has always had the world at his feet. If he had ever had to earn his living he would have had to pretend like the rest.” Vanbrugh’s brow contracted as he added: “The Queen said to me once: ‘I like you, Sir Bernard, because you always tell me the exact truth.’ I replied to her: ‘That is the reason, Madam, why it has taken me forty years to come into your presence.’” The physician’s long and stern fight with society, as represented by his own profession, had qualified him to sympathize with another Ishmael, though one of a very different order. His indulgence for Lord Alistair did not spring from any flexibility in his own standard of conduct; but for the shams of European morality, for the decorum which consists in keeping one’s wife in London, and one’s concubines in Paris, he had as strong a contempt as Alistair’s own. The proprieties of the cupboard-door were equally loathsome to both; the hackneyed dance of society, for ever whirling giddily round on the skirts of the Divorce Court maelstrom, was equally repellent.