She glared up at George, and the moonlight caught her face the wrong way and made her look old. All the same, she would not have dared to say all this if she hadn't felt sure of Simon, and it proved that he hadn't been silly enough to make her think it worth while to be jealous of Ariadne. "I always thought Mercutio by far the most interesting character in the piece. Come, good Mercutio! Romeo, fare--I mean flirt well!" They turned away and left Simon grinding his little pearly teeth. "I consider all that in _beastly_ taste!" he said, whacking the rail with Ariadne's fan. Of course it broke, and Ariadne cried out like a baby when you have smashed its favourite toy. Simon was thoroughly out of temper with all the world, Ariadne included. Lady Scilly had called him Romeo; well, he was jealous of Mercutio! Such is man--and boy! He spoke quite crossly to Ariadne. "I'll give you a new one. I'll give you twenty new ones. Let us go in and dance--dance like the devil!" Ernie told me a great deal about Lady Scilly after they had all gone in. He knows a lot about her, through his father, who has a place near the Scillys in Wiltshire. He says his father says that at this present moment she hasn't got a cent to call her own; what with gambling, and betting, she is fairly broke. I wish, then, she would try to borrow money off George--just once--for that would choke him off her soonest of anything, and then he would perhaps be nicer to mother? Ariadne would not go to bed at all that night. She sat in the window, eating dried raisins, just to keep soul and body together. And all the time her affairs were progressing most favourably. She was vexed because she saw that Lady Scilly did not consider her worth being jealous of. I told her she was never nearer getting Simon than now when he was bringing a heart that Lady Scilly had bruised by sordid monetary considerations to her, to stroke and make well by her soothing ways. And Ariadne is soothing, she can do the silence dodge well. She is a regular walking rest-cure, I tell her, for those that like it. Simon was unusually nice to her all the next week, just as I prophesied he would be. Then an untoward event happened.