The death of Mrs. Amp, said Dwight-Rankin, was the sensation of Paris in the spring of the year 1924. Who Mr. Amp was, it appeared, no one knew for certain. But it was said that he had fallen in love with a photograph of an English gentlewoman in Arab costume, had plunged into the desert to commune with his passion and had been kidnapped by a sheikess in plus-fours who had a fancy for bald Americans with bulging eyes. However.... Mrs. Amp, said Dwight-Rankin, died suddenly and terribly; and her mangled remains were the subject of discussion in society for many a day. It was a Friday evening, and all Paris was dressing itself to be present at a dinner-party that Mrs. Amp was to give that evening at the Ritz Hotel. “Just here, where we are sitting now,” said Dwight-Rankin, turning a glassy eye about the restaurant and accepting an invitation hurled at him by the Duchess of Putney to dine next Thursday to meet the Shah of Pongistan on the occasion of his having lost his job. On that Friday evening, said Dwight-Rankin, there was only one person of note in Paris who was not dressing to be present at Mrs. Amp’s dinner-party. That, said Dwight-Rankin, was Lady Surplice. Mrs. Amp and Lady Surplice did not speak. That is to say, said Dwight-Rankin, they spoke to everyone about each other; but when they met, had you dropped a pin between them it would have made a noise like a bomb, and had you lit a match there would have been a cascade of water from the melting ice. Lady Surplice, said Dwight-Rankin, had been the greatest hostess in Europe for twenty years. London dined with her when she was in London, Paris dined with her when she was in Paris, Mussolini met her at the station when she went to Rome, New York hailed her as the Duchess of Mayfair, while Palm Beach was her rouge-pot and over Ascot she cast her lorgnette. Naturally all this was very encouraging for Lady Surplice, and she bitterly resented any interference with her habits. However.... Lord Surplice--only technically known, said Dwight-Rankin severely, as “the Earl of”--did not assist at his wife’s entertainments. He was understood to be taking the waters for diabetes at a hydropathic establishment near Woodhall Spa. Or maybe, said Dwight-Rankin, it was liver trouble and Tunbridge Wells, but one can’t know everything.