“My dear, I know perfectly well what charity and St. James’s Hall means. It means guinea tickets. Charity should begin at home, not at St. James’s Hall. However, I daresay you will appropriate all the proceeds. So near the Circus, too. Really, Piccadilly Circus is too fascinating. I should like to have a house in the very centre of it, with a glass gallery all round, and really see life. Yes, one more piece of muffin,--not for myself, but for Suez Canal. Suez Canal is so lonely, poor darling, without Sahara; but there is muffin _quand même_. Naughty! I’m sure the servants feed him. And so everybody is to be married in May. Fancy the Bear coming round like that--even Bears will turn--about Helen and Frank. Apparently, they are quite inseparable,--the Bear and Frank I mean, and tie each other’s bootlaces, and are converting each other to Christianity and Atheism respectively. Bears and buns! Frank is a bun, and the Bear has decided it is worth climbing up a pole to get him. I think it is a mistake to have said that. Besides, it is absolutely untrue. The Bear wouldn’t climb a yard to marry Helen to the Czar. How terrible Russia must be, with everything ending in ‘owsky’! I tried to flirt with the Bear myself, and had no success of any kind whatever. Dear Suez! No Sahara. The world is a desert without Sahara. But mayn’t I tempt you with a small piece of bun with sugar on the top? How depressing marriages are!” Lady Sunningdale sighed heavily. “What is the matter?” asked Stella, sympathetically. “I don’t know. Dearest, that Louis XVI. clock is too beautiful. I wish I were a millionaire. Yes. I think I am depressed because everything is going exactly as I planned it. There is nothing so tiresome as success. You two children sitting there, Frank and Helen, all my own ideas, and all going precisely as I wished. You are my idea, too, Martin, a figment of my brain. I invented you. And you are going precisely as I wished. Every one says nobody ever played the least like you. But the Bear is still in a rage with you, is he not? That is so English. English people are always in a rage about something, the state of the weather, or France, or their children. I never get in a rage. I have no time for that sort of thing. Stella dearest, I think it will have to be you to go down to Chartries next, and induce the Bear to be propitiated. Heavens, how dreadful it must be to have a very strong sense of duty! It must be like toast-crumbs in your bed, after you have breakfasted there, when one can’t lie comfortable for five minutes together.” “No, I am the next,” said Martin. “I shall be staying with my uncle at Easter, and shall try to see my father then. I daresay it will do no good.” “Do you really care?” asked Lady Sunningdale. “I really don’t see why you should. He is unreasonable. I shouldn’t worry.” Stella turned to Martin with a certain air of expectancy.