"You must remember the good of the community always first, girl," Lady Garribardine had said. "If you want to benefit humanity you must not be too much occupied with the individual. For the good of the community certain standards must be kept up, and sensible people should put on blinkers when examining the frailties of human nature. Nature says one thing and civilisation and orthodox morality another; there must logically be an eternal conflict going on between the two and the only chance for souls to achieve orthodox morality is for hypocrisy to assist them by hiding bad examples given when nature has had an outburst and won the game. If you won't conform to these practical rules it is wiser and less harmful to your neighbours for you to go and live in the wilds--I am all for _tenue_, I am all for the uplifting of the soul where it is possible, and decency and good taste where it is not." "I see," responded Katherine. "One must in this, as in all other things, look to the end." "You have indeed said it!" Her Ladyship cried. "That faculty is the quintessence of statesmanship, as it is of wisdom, and one we never see displayed by a radical government!" As the season went on in London, various peeps at society were afforded Katherine, and as her eyes opened, and the keenness of her understanding developed, she learned many useful lessons. On rare Saturday afternoons, she visited the museums again with Gerard Strobridge, to her intense delight, and with much pain as well as pleasure to him, and when the big Saturday to Monday parties came down to Blissington, Lady Garribardine often found her secretary invaluable for the entertainment of unavoidable bores. Thus by the autumn, when Gerard's aching soul and denied passions thought to take solace in flight on that mission to Teheran, Katherine Bush was an established institution at tea time, and had acquired the art of conversation in a degree which would have pleased Chesterfield himself! To make herself liked by women was the immediate objective she had laid down for herself. Of what use to gain the little pleasure by the way, of the gratification of her vanity from the incense of men? She must wait until some one man appeared upon the scene, the securing of whom would be her definite goal--then she could pursue her aims without the stumbling-block of female antagonism. She learned many things from her employer: tolerance--kindness of heart--supreme contempt for all shams, apart from that of necessary moral hypocrisy, which seeming paradox she grew to realise was a sensible assistance to the attainment of a general moral ideal. Her wits sharpened, her brain expanded, her cultivation increased and her manners assumed an exquisite refinement and graciousness; and when the second Christmas came and the New Year of 1913, no one could possibly have discovered the faintest trace of Bindon's Green, or of the lower middle class from which she had sprung.