‘You give me hope, Lady Kirkdale.’ ‘Mr. Travers, I am afraid you are a very, very bad man. Come, let us go to the piano.’ The Marchioness of Kirkdale had always been enterprising. She had the experience of life only given to those ladies whose husbands are thoroughly and brutally immoral: voluptuaries who have no foresight, who do not realise that it is sometimes amusing to talk to an innocent woman, when one is thoroughly bored by those who are not innocent. Lady Kirkdale’s suspicions had been aroused by the violent friendship her young son had conceived for George Travers; and having her own theories about the education of young men, she at once invited her son’s crony to afternoon tea at the little house they occupied in Davies Street, Berkeley Square. ‘A man’s behaviour in a drawing-room is one of the tests you should always apply before you allow him to enjoy your confidence, Stephen,’ she had said. ‘A drawing-room is such an inconceivably uninteresting place,’ sighed Stephen. ‘That is the reason why, as a test, it is so invaluable; any commonly brilliant man can amuse men in a club, or women at the Continental; but it requires the most subtle quintessence of wit to penetrate the brain of the great world without shocking its susceptibilities; neither radical paradoxes nor coarse allusions can be brought into play there, without social ruin.’ ‘Is social ruin possible nowadays?’ ‘My dear Kirkdale!’ ‘I gauge the public feeling of society by its attitude in public, and when I sit in a box at the theatre and see the stalls greet the passionate utterances of a ruined woman with a contemptuous smile, as if that sort of sentiment were quite out of date, I come to the conclusion that social ruin means nothing now.’ ‘My poor Kirkdale, if you think society is represented in the stalls at a theatre, you are still more unsophisticated than I had dared hope. But you and Geraldine are always puzzling me. There is a persistence of innocence, I might almost say ignorance, of life about you both, which I cannot understand.’ Kirkdale laughed gaily. ‘The rule of contraries always does surprise people.’ Lady Kirkdale looked hard at her son; he smiled pleasantly; then she said, ‘You will never appreciate the difficulties of my position, Kirkdale.’ ‘Yes, I do, mother, although I may be stupid about obvious truths everybody else appreciates at once; I have a sort of brain of my own concealed in my skull. Geraldine and I were both born old, and we’re growing young by degrees, don’t you see?’ ‘My dear boy, what nonsense you talk!’ ‘Every one must have a childhood some time or other on their own account. In our old home, when my father was alive, childhood was impossible. Let us enjoy it now.’