For the fact was that Stella was now nearly twenty-three. She had refused several very suitable offers, and her mother, extremely anxious, as all good mothers should be, to get her married, had lately begun to be afraid that she was “being silly.” This in her vocabulary meant that Stella was in love with somebody (Lady Monica thought she knew with whom) and was not clever enough to make him propose to her. What added enormity to her “silliness” was the fact that he was extremely eligible. Lady Monica had no sympathy with this sort of thing; she had never been silly herself, and her own sentimental history had been that some twenty-four years ago she had wooed, proposed to, and wedded her Reginald without any fuss whatever or any delay. She was a woman with a great deal of hard, useful common sense; she always knew exactly what she wanted, and almost always got it. Her only weakness, in fact (with the discovery of the new _masseuse_, her complexion had become a positive source of strength), was for feeble flirtations with young men of the age which she herself wished to look. These never came to anything at all; and when the young man in question married somebody perfectly different, she told all her friends that she had made him. She had during the last week or two, since the session had brought them to London, done a little vicarious love-making to Martin on Stella’s account, and enjoyed it on her own. She was a perfectly honest woman, and only played with fire as a child plays with matches, lighting them and blowing them out, and she never really set fire to herself, and quite certainly never even scorched anybody else. But anxiety, like a draught, had reached her with regard to Stella’s future, and the next evening, when Lady Sunningdale happened to be giving a menagerie-party, she determined to have a few words with her, for she was looked upon as a sort of book of reference with regard to the twins. The menagerie-party was so called because for a week beforehand Lady Sunningdale drove about London a good deal and screamed an invitation to everybody she saw in the streets. The lions only were fed; the meaner animals and those lions only observed too late to ask to dinner came in afterwards. Lady Monica and Stella belonged to this second category, and Lady Sunningdale hailed them with effusion.