All that season she was absolutely indefatigable: she tried charity, and engaged a fifty-guinea supper-table at Middlesex House for the evening party on behalf of Lighthouse keepers. She lent her ball-room for a conference on Roumanian folk-songs given by the idol of the Mayfair drawing-rooms, and standing by the door as the audience arrived shook hands with as many of them as she could. She tried to be original, had a wigwam erected in the same room, and hired a troupe of Red Indians from the White City, who danced and made the most godless noises on outlandish instruments, but somehow the originality of the entertainment was swamped in its extreme tediousness. She tried to be conventional and took a box at the opera, where twice a week she and two or three perfectly unknown young men wondered who everybody was. She hired a yacht for the Cowes week and a depopulated grouse-moor in Sutherlandshire, but for all her exertions she only got a little further out on the horizontal branch of the tree she so longed to climb. Nothing happened: she made no mark and only spent money, which, after all, any one can do, if he is only fortunate enough to have it. She labours on, faint and rather older, but pursuing. She is always delighted if any one proposes himself to lunch or dinner, because, with the true climber’s instinct, she always thinks it may lead to something. But it is to be feared that all it leads to is that slight drooping of the horizontal bough at the end, and not towards the birds that sing among the topmost branches. She lacked something in her equipment which Nature had not given her, the _flair_ for the people who matter, the knowledge of the precise ingredients in the successful bird-lime.... But her husband never regrets the Brook Street house with the ball-room. He plays Badminton in it by electric light on his return from his office. CHAPTER NINE CLIMBERS: II. THE PERPENDICULAR If you are an observant person addicted to washing your hands and face, you can hardly fail to have noticed the legend ‘Whitehand’ imprinted on your basin and soap-dish, and indeed on every sort of crockery. Probably, if you thought about it at all, you imagined that this was a trade-name, alluding to the effect of washing, but it is not really so at all. Mr. Whitehand is the kind American gentleman who supplies so many of us with these articles of toilet, and as a consequence Mr. Whitehand is rich if not beyond the feverish dreams of avarice, at any rate, as rich as avarice can possibly desire to be in its waking moments.