"Not at all. If you said that I was like Connie Esdaile, I should embrace you before the assembled company; and if you said she was like me, she'd never forgive you as long as she lived. It is through reasoning out things in this way that men make such idiotic mistakes." "Isn't it funny," Elisabeth remarked, "that if you reason a thing out you're always wrong, and if you never reason about it at all you're always right?" "Ah! but that is because you are a genius," murmured Cecil Farquhar. Lady Silverhampton contradicted him. "Not at all; it's because she is a woman." "Well, I'd rather be a woman than a genius any day," said Elisabeth; "it takes less keeping up." "You are both," said Cecil. "And I'm neither," added Lord Bobby; "so what's the state of the odds?" "Let's invent more invisible costumes," cried Lady Silverhampton; "they interest me. Suggest another one, Elisabeth." "I should design a special one for lovers in the country. Don't you know how you are always coming upon lovers in country lanes, and how hard they try to look as if they weren't there, and how badly they succeed? I should dress them entirely in green, faintly relieved by brown; and then they'd look as if they were only part of the hedges and stiles." "How the lovers of the future will bless you!" exclaimed Lord Bobby. "I only regret that my love-making days are over before your patent costumes come out. I remember Sir Richard Esdaile once coming upon Violet and me when we were spooning in the shrubbery at Esdaile Court, and we tried in vain to efface ourselves and become as part of the scenery. You see, it is so difficult to look exactly like two laurel bushes, when one of you is dressed in pink muslin and the other in white flannel." Lady Robert blushed becomingly. "Oh, Bobby, it wasn't pink muslin that day; it was blue cambric." "That doesn't matter. There are as many laurel bushes made out of pink muslin as out of blue cambric, when you come to that. The difficulty of identifying one's self with one's environment (that's the correct expression, my dear) would be the same in either costume; but Miss Farringdon is now going, once for all, to remove that difficulty." "I came upon two young people in a lane not long ago," said Elisabeth, "and the minute they saw me they began to walk in the ditches, one on one side of the road and one on the other. Now if only they had worn my costumes, such a damp and uncomfortable mode of going about the country would have been unnecessary; besides, it was absurd in any case. If you were walking with your mother-in-law you wouldn't walk as far apart as that; you wouldn't be able to hear a word she said."