The Comte des Louvres visited the house in Beers Cooperage, and professed himself enchanted with everything about it, but most of all with its nearness to Chestnut-Tree Walk. “We are neighbours now,” he declared, “and I shall expect you to look me up very often. Drop in whenever you have nothing better to do.” The Frenchman threw a flattering deference into his manner towards Molly now that her position seemed to be established. He was keen enough to see the direction in which her ambitions pointed, and he threw out hints of his ability to help her. By way of a beginning he invited her to his house to meet some of the ladies who had held stalls at the famous bazaar. Lady Alistair did not refuse the invitations. She appeared in the Count’s shabby drawing-room, flaunting in the extravagance of the past, and scored a feminine triumph over women whose whole yearly dress allowance would not have paid for one of her frocks. But Molly was too shrewd to mistake these gatherings, at which tea was handed round by the two Vanes, and the conversation turned chiefly on the Legitimist cause and its prospects, for the kind of society she had aspired to. The women to whom Des Louvres introduced her were as much outside the pale as herself, though for different reasons, and in the end they tired her by their pretentious gentility, and she left off trying to mix with them. It was borne in upon the poor little woman that her dream of respectability was never likely to be realized. The cruel frankness of the Duchess had broken her spirit. The dismal vision of the Home began to rise up before her as a final destiny. Very often she cried now when she was alone. It seemed to her that life could never be jolly again. Nothing had turned out as she had hoped. Marriage seemed to have made things worse instead of better. Alistair left her to herself as much as formerly, and when he was with her they had less and less to say to one another. And they became really poor. The Duke’s intentions as regards his brother’s allowance remained undeclared. In the meantime the South Kensington furniture, the copper saucepans, and the Cromwellian oak had been bought on the hire system, and there was trouble about the instalments. Once or twice already they had had to dine at home on slices of ham brought in from a shop in the Westminster Bridge Road, because they could not afford a meal at a restaurant. And now the winter was upon them.