"I wonder if you remember when we met in London, Mr. Davidge? It was just after the poor _Lusitania_ was sunk." "So it was," said Davidge. "It was at Sir Joseph Webling's. You knew he was dead, didn't you? Or did you?" "Yes, Miss Webling told me." "Oh, did she! I was curious to know." She cast a look past him at Marie Louise and saw that the girl was about ready to make a scene. She smiled and deferred further torture. Mrs. Prothero supervened. She had the beautiful theory that the way to make her guests happy was to get them to talking about themselves. She tried to draw Davidge out of his shell. But he talked about her husband instead, and of the great work he had done for the navy. He turned the tables of graciousness on her. Her nod recognized the chivalry; her lips smiled with pride in her husband's praise; her eyes glistened with an old regret made new. "He would have been useful now," she sighed. "He was the man who laid the keel-blocks of our new navy," said Davidge. "The thing we haven't got and have got to get is a merchant marine." He could talk of that, though he could not celebrate himself. He was still going strong when the dinner was finished. Mrs. Prothero clung to the old custom. She took the women away with her to the drawing-room, leaving the men alone. Davidge noted that Lady Clifton-Wyatt left the dining-room with a kind of eagerness, Marie Louise reluctantly. She cast him a look that seemed to cry "Help!" He wondered what the feud could be that threw Miss Webling into such apparent panic. He could not tolerate the thought that she had a yellow streak in her. CHAPTER VI Lady Clifton-Wyatt, like many another woman, was kept in order by the presence of men. She knew that the least charming of attributes in masculine eyes are the female feline, the gift and art of claws. Men can be catty, too--tom-catty, yet contemptibly feline when they are not on their good behavior. There are times when the warning, "Gentlemen, there are ladies present," restores them to order as quickly as the entrance of a teacher turns a school-room of young savages into an assembly of young saints. The women in Mrs. Prothero's drawing-room could not hear any of the words the men mixed with their smoke, but they could hear now and then a muffled explosion of laughter of a quality that indicated what had provoked it. The women, too, were relieved of a certain constraint by their isolation. They seemed to enjoy the release. It was like getting their minds out of tight corsets. They were not impatient for the men--as some of the men may have imagined. These women were of an age where they had something else to think of besides men. They had careers to make or keep among women as well as the men among men.