He got up before Lady Beauvayse could rejoin, and had met Patrine, and engineered her into his vacated seat next her friend upon the divan almost before she knew. She lowered her tall person upon the cushions, studiously avoiding von Herrnung’s glances. She wore a white embroidered gown of cobwebby material and extreme scantiness, a stole of black cock’s feathers was looped about her shoulders, and on her dead beech-leaf-coloured hair sat a curious little hat of glittering silver spangles, from which sprang a single black cock’s plume. "What have you all been talking about?" she asked, looking about her. Lady Wastwood, who sat near, answered, balancing her long, slim, fragile personality on the fender-stool before the hearth that was filled with tall ferns and flowering plants in pots: "We were saying—what a wretched pity the process of racial reproduction is so abominably unbecoming. It really points to a loose style of reasoning on the part of Nature—or whoever it is who arranges these things!" Who does not know Lady Wastwood. She affected, at this period, a skull-cap of gold-green hair and a triangular chalk-white face, with a V-shaped mouth, painted scarlet as a Pierrot’s. Her eyebrows were black and resembled musical slurs. Through her few diaphanous garments you could have counted every bone of her frail person, so light that it was a favourite vacation joke with her eldest boy—who was now at Sandhurst qualifying for a Cavalry Commission—to sprint with his widowed mother on his shoulder up and down corridors and stairs. Listen to Trixie: "I suppose—Nature. She’s so unreasonable—that must be why she’s a she, in literature. She implanted in us poor women the raging desire to be pretty under all imaginable circumstances.... At the same time she says to us: ’You’re immoral, unnatural, and selfish, if you don’t replenish the Race. Go and do it!’ Consequently, when one is ordered in that bullying way to choose between immorality and ugliness, one calls out: ’Oh! do let me be pretty, please!’" A soldierly, good-looking man, sitting with a charming girl in a particularly smoky corner, lazily propounded: "Why do women covet prettiness beyond everything?" "To please men, I rather surmise," said Lady Beauvayse, turning her Romney head in the direction of the speaker, who queried: "Ah! but why do women want to please men?" "I can answer that," interrupted Mrs. Charterhouse. "Because she who pleases is perfectly sure of having a gorgeous time." "It has been said by some inspired idiot," lisped Lady Wastwood "that women make themselves beautiful for the sake of their own sex. Give us your opinion on this question, Count von Herrnung. Did I put on this perfectly devey frock for Miss Saxham, or for you?" "_Gnädige Gräfin_, for neither myself nor Miss Saxham. For your own pleasure," said von Herrnung, "have you joy in making yourself beautiful."