'I know, I know,' she said, carrying it off with an air of comic contrition. 'I even said, "There's a modesty in nature that it isn't wise to overstep" (I'd forgotten some people think speech-making comes under that head). "It's been realized," I said--yes, rushing on my doom!--"it's been realized up to now only in the usual one-sided way--discouraging boys from marrying women old enough to be their mothers. But dear, blundering, fatuous man"'--she smiled into her husband's pleasantly mocking face--'"_he_ thinks," I said, "at _any_ age he's a fit mate for a fresh young creature in her teens. If they only knew--the dreadful old ogres!" Yes, I said that. I piled it on--oh, I stuck at nothing! "The men think an ugly old woman monopolizes all the opportunities humanity offers for repulsiveness. But there's nothing on the face of the earth as hideous," I said, "as an ugly old man. Doesn't it stand to reason? He's bound to go greater lengths than any woman can aspire to. There's more of him to _be_ ugly, isn't there? I appealed to them--everything about him is bigger, coarser--he's much less human," says I, "and _much_ more like a dreadful old monkey." I raised my wretched eyes, and there, not three feet away, was the aged husband of the Fox-Moore woman ogling Hermione Heriot! Oh, let me die!' Mrs. Freddy leaned against the blue-grey sofa for a moment and half closed her pretty eyes. The next instant she was running gaily across the room to welcome Richard Farnborough and Captain Beeching. * * * * * 'I always know,' said Lord Borrodaile, glancing over the banisters as he and Vida went down--'I always know the kind of party it's going to be when I see--certain people. Don't you?' 'I know who you mean,' Vida whispered back, her eyes on Mrs. Graham Townley's aggressively high-piled hair towering over the bald pate of the minister, as, side by side, they disappeared through the dining-room door. 'Why _does_ Laura have her?' 'Well, she's immensely intelligent, they _say_,' he sighed. 'That's why I wonder,' laughed Vida. '_We_ are rather frivolous, I'm afraid.' 'To tell the truth, I wondered, too. I even sounded my sister-in-law.' 'Well?' 'She said it was her Day of Reckoning. "I never ask the woman," she said, "except to a scratch party like this."' '"Scratch party"--with you and me here!' 'Ah, we are the leaven. We make the compound possible.' 'Still, I don't think she ought to call it "scratch" when she's got an Ambassador and a Cabinet Minister----' 'Just the party to ask a scratch Cabinet Minister to,' he insisted, stopping between the two cards inscribed respectively with their names. 'As for the Ambassador, he's an old friend of ours--knows his London well--knows we are the most tolerant society on the face of the earth.'