The Archdeacon’s table-partner was Mrs. Billie Thyme, a small pink, flaxen lady, whose over-rich elderly husband financed her fads, and in consequence gave her ample opportunity to shine in the personal paragraphs of evening newspapers. Mrs. Billie was not the least bit _blasée_, although even she was sighing for new excitements to conquer. She was always in an infinite vein of flutter and chatter. Most exalted personages were glad to talk nonsense with her; at bazaars and garden-parties her skirt-dancing drew the crowd. She was a prime favourite of the Duchess, and kept the dinner-circle well entertained with tinkling talk. It was she who began on the fairies. They were seldom left out of the conversation of these times. June was still dreamily inert, throned on a large silver salt-cellar, watching and indifferently wondering, not yet vividly interested enough to use these puppets for the march-forward of her ideas. "And what are we to think of this fairy craze?" Mrs. Thyme asked of the company generally. There was no immediate response. The Archdeacon left the question for someone else to answer. In Society he tried habitually to sit on the fence. "A nine-day’ wonder!" said Lord Geoffrey. "Mere nonsense, as ping-pong and diabolo were." "A folly to-day; forgotten to-morrow; and afterwards a sad reflection"--this from a novelist of the moment--"democracy is a baby which quickly breaks its toys." "It has already lasted nearby nine weeks," answered the Duke quietly. "It is strange; I don’t understand it. That Mansion-House fellow, the Lord Mayor, began it. The movement seems spreading. Most movements do spread nowadays. We didn’t do that sort of thing in the seventies." "Indeed, no," agreed the Duchess, in her best commanding-officer voice. "When I was a ’gairl,’ belief in the fairies lingered amongst the Irish and nowhere else. Those Board Schools and Trade Unions have caused this nonsense, I’m sure." "There is one encouraging fact, Duchess!" cried the novelist, of course an egoist, who called himself Douglas le Dare, though his patronymic was Barlow, and his father had christened him William. "It is that in our literature--the test of our minds--we keep to sane life and the plain truth. Fairy tales are not written nowadays; such originality is futility. We weave our romances round every-day life, we adorn dull truth, and what’s the result? I sold fifty thousand copies of my last book." "Did you really?" said Mrs. Thyme, opening her blue eyes to their widest. "I think I will write!" "Ha!" he said, as he shook back his iron-grey locks--his hair was an advertisement--"you should write, but deal with facts--facts--the fairies--pah!--they are merely a sort of mental fungi. The public wants prose. Always please the public! That is the root of literary success."