“Poor little life that toddles half an hour, Crowned with a flower or two, and there an end—” Sir Godfrey’s device for diverting his wife’s mind from the morbid fancies of the previous night answered admirably. She left Dorchester in high spirits, after having invited her cousins to Cheriton for tennis and lunch on the following day, and after having bade an affectionate good-bye to Theodore, who was to start on his holiday directly he could make an end of some important business now in hand. His father told him laughingly that he might have gone a week earlier had he really wanted to go. “I believe there must be some attraction for you in Dorchester, though I am not clever enough to find out what it is,” said Mr. Dalbrook, innocently, “for you have been talking about going away for the last fortnight, and yet you don’t go.” Lady Carmichael had lingered in the homely old house till afternoon tea, had lingered over her tea, telling her cousins all they wanted to know about smart society in London, that one central spot of bright white light in the dull, grey mass of a busy, commonplace world, of which she knew so much, and of which they knew so little. Janet and Sophia professed to be above caring for these things, except from a purely philosophical point of view, as they cared for ants, bees, and wasps; but they listened eagerly all the same, with occasional expressions of wonder that human beings could be so trivial. “Five hundred pounds spent in flowers at Lady Drumlock’s ball!” cried Sophy, “and to think that in a few more million years the sun may be as cold as the north pole, and what trace will there be then of all this butterfly world?” “Did the Mountains cut a tremendous dash this season?” asked Janet, frivolously curious about their immediate neighbours, county people who went to London for the season. “Of course you know she had thirty thousand pounds left her by an uncle quite lately. And she is so utterly without brains that I dare say she will spend it all in entertainments.” “Oh, they did entertain a good deal, and they did their best, poor things, and people went to them,” Juanita answered, with a deprecating air; “but still I should hardly like to say that they are _in_ society. In the first place, she has never succeeded in getting the Prince at any of her dances; and in the next place, her parties have a cloud of provincial dulness upon them, against which it is in vain to struggle. He can never forget his constituents and his duty to his borough, and that kind of thing does not answer if one wants to give really nice parties. I’m afraid her legacy won’t do her much good, poor soul, unless she gets some clever person to show her how to spend it. There is a kind of society instinct, don’t you know, and she is without it. I believe the people who give good parties are born, not made—like poets and orators.”