“Its respectability.” “Are hotels ever respectable,--I ask you. Though, possibly, the horridest are.” “Aren’t they all horrid!” “_Natürlich_; but do you know those cheap hotels where the guests are treated like naughty children?” “No. I must confess I don’t,” the Ambassadress laughed. “Ah, there you are....” Lady Something considered a moment a distant gardener employed in tying Chrysanthemum blooms to little sticks. “I’m bothered about a cook,” she said. “And I, about a maid! I dismissed Ffoliott this morning--well I simply _had_ to--for a figure salient.” “So awkward out here to replace anyone; I’m sure I don’t know....” the Ambassadress replied, her eyes hovering tragically over the pantaloons strained to _splitting_ point, of the stooping gardener. “It’s a pretty prospect....” “Life is a compound!” Lady Something defined it at last. Mrs Chilleywater turned surprised. “Not even Socrates,” she declared, “said anything truer than that.” “A compound!” Lady Something twittered again. “I should like to put that into the lips of Delitsiosa.” “Who’s Delitsiosa?” the Ambassadress asked as a smothered laugh broke out beside her. Mrs Chilleywater looked up. “I’d forgotten you were there. Strange thing among the cedar-boughs,” she said. The Hon. Lionel Limpness tossed a slippered foot flexibly from his hammock. “You may well ask ‘who’s Delitsiosa’!” he exclaimed. “She is my new heroine,” Mrs Chilleywater replied, after a few quick little clutches at her hair. “I trust you won’t treat her, dear, quite so shamefully as your last.” The Authoress tittered. “Delitsiosa is the wife of Marsden Didcote,” she said, “the manager of a pawn-shop in the district of Maida Vale, and in the novel he seduces an innocent seamstress, Iris Drummond, who comes in one day to redeem her petticoat (and really I don’t know how I did succeed in drawing the portrait of a little fool!) ... and when Delitsiosa, her suspicions aroused, can no longer doubt or ignore her husband’s intimacy with Iris, already engaged to a lusty young farmer in Kent--(some boy)--she decides to yield herself to the entreaties of her brother-in-law Percy, a junior partner in the firm, which brings about the great tussle between the two brothers on the edge of the Kentish cliffs. Iris and Delitsiosa--Iris is anticipating a babelet soon--are watching them from a cornfield, where they’re boiling a kettle for afternoon tea; and oh, I’ve such a darling description of a cornfield. I make you _feel_ England!” “No really, my dear,” Lady Something exclaimed. “Harold pretends it would be wonderful, arranged as an Opera ... with duos and things and a _Liebestod_ for Delitzi towards the close.” “No, no,” Mr Limpness protested: “What would become of our modern fiction at all if Victoria Gellybore Frinton gave herself up to the stage?”