The Baroness was looking her best, and knew it. She had slept well the night before, and her eyes were soft and clear. Her maid had been unusually successful with her hair, and her hat, which had arrived only that morning from Paris, was quite the smartest in the room. She was at her favourite restaurant, and her solitary companion was a good-looking man, added to which the caviar was delightfully fresh, and the toast crisp and thin. Consequently the Baroness was in a particularly good temper. "I really do wish, my dear friend," she said, smiling across at him, "that I could do what you ask. But it is not so simple, not so simple as you think. You say, 'Give me the address of your friend,' You ask me nicely, and I like you well enough to be glad to do it. But Louise she say to me, 'Give no one my address! Let no one know where I am gone.'" "I'm sure she didn't mean that to apply to me," Wrayson pleaded. "Ah! but she even mentioned your name," the Baroness declared. "I say to her, 'Not even Mr. Wrayson?' and she answered, 'No! No! No!'" "And you promised?" he asked. "Why, yes! What else could I do?" she replied. "I say to her, 'You are a very foolish girl, Louise. After you have gone you will be sorry. Mr. Wrayson will be angry with you, and I shall make myself very, very agreeable to him, and who knows but he will forget all about you?' But Louise she only shake her head. She knows her own countrymen too well. They are so terribly insularly constant." "Is that such a very bad quality, Baroness?" "Ah! I find it so," she admitted. "I do not like the man who can think of only one thing, only one woman at a time. He is so dull, he has no imagination. If he has only one sweetheart, how can he know anything about us? for in a hundred different women there are no two alike." "That is all very well," Wrayson answered, smiling; "but, you see, if a man cares very much for one particular woman, he hasn't the least curiosity about the rest of her sex." She sighed gently, and her eyes flashed her regrets. Very blue eyes they were to-day, almost as blue as the turquoises about her throat. "They say," she murmured, "that some Englishmen are like that. It is so much a pity--when they are nice!" "I suppose," he suggested, "that yours is the Continental point of view." She was silent until the waiter, who was filling her glass with white wine, had departed. Then she leaned over towards him. Her forehead was a little wrinkled, her eyebrows raised. She had the half-plaintive air of a child who is complaining of being unjustly whipped. "Yes! I think it is," she answered. "The lover, as I know him, is one who could not be unkind to a woman. In his heart he is faithful, perhaps, to one, but for her sake the whole world of beautiful women are objects of interest to him. He will flirt with them when they will. He is always their admirer. In the background there may always be what you call the preference, but that is his secret."