"Of course, I won't talk about it," she said, "but I shall never speak to Madge again. And my portrait was being done by Mr. Dundas, which makes it very awkward. Of course, I want it finished, but how _can_ I go to sit to him again?" This was a new light which Gladys had not yet considered. "Of course, he has ruined himself," she said cheerfully. "Nobody will go to be painted by him now. And consider his relation to Philip! Why, he was his best friend. I haven't dared to see Madge's mother yet, but I understand she is mad with rage, and I'm sure I don't wonder. And they were married, I hear, on Saturday, and have left London. How can people be such fools!" This last remark was a genuine _cri du coeur_, for Gladys was absolutely unable to perceive how any interior impulse could possibly prove too strong for discretion, for _savoir faire_--she was fond of scraps of French--for any rending of or throwing out of window those social pads and cushions which alone ensure a passage through life that will be free from succession of bumps and jars. That was why she was almost universally considered so charming: she always said the pleasant thing, and did the agreeable one (for everybody had to assist the pads and cushions), unless she was quite safe from detection. Then, it is true, the sheathed claws occasionally popped out, when it was quite dark, but before the return of light they were always sheathed again, and the velvet touch was in evidence. "Imagine the marriage!" she went on. "A sexton and a sextoness were probably the witnesses, and they probably came--the happy pair, I mean--in a hansom and went away in a four-wheeler. Such nonsense to wreck your life like that. And a wreck is a crime; it is a danger to other shipping unless it is blown up." Now what Gladys said so directly, all London was thinking, if not with the same precision, at any rate with the same general trend. There had been a violation of its social codes, flagrant and open, and for the time, at any rate, it was disposed to visit the offence with the full severity of its displeasure. As Gladys had remarked: "How could they be such fools!" and the children of this world, being wiser in their generation than the children of light, are the first to punish folly. And it is very foolish to openly break the rules which Society has laid down if you wish to continue to occupy your usual arm-chair in that charming club. For the rules are so few, and so very easy to remember, and Evelyn and Madge had quite distinctly broken one of the most elementary of them. And Society, however accommodating in many lines, never forgives, at once anyhow, any such open violation of its laws as this. But just at present neither of the sinners cared nearly so much for all these laws as they cared for a single moment of this blue, fresh-winded day.