Failing drugs--and one has to be a smart society lady, a broken man or woman, for them--there are various palliatives. You may turn on the light and read till sleep comes with soothing fingers upon tired brows. Or, if young and enterprising, you can go for a walk and see the dawn. Or sometimes an impromptu bedroom picnic--bread and cheese and a bottle of beer raided thief-wise from the pantry, taking great care not to let the stairs creak and alarm the house--may have excellent results. These, and a score of similar expedients, may be recommended with assurance to the patient. And if they fail, at least they have passed an hour or so more pleasantly than in mere acquiescence. Beatrice lay awake, sorely against her will. She knew that sleep was what she needed, and would need still more within some fourteen hours. The strain of acting, followed by her preposterous adventure at the magnanimous churchwarden's, had used up more of her nervous resources than was desirable. Sleep was therefore the obvious thing. But alas! it proved the impossible thing, too, and she lay restless, aglow with thought, waiting impatiently for what she knew would not come. What did she think of during those hours of frenzied vision? Was it of Lukos, waiting in an eastern prison for the news that would set him free to join her? Was it her dead son, the little boy she had spoken of to Lionel? Or Turkey, the land of her adoption, struggling for freedom, enmeshed with perils, the slave of diplomatic and selfish adventures? Her art--had it a place within those weary wheels of thought; her success on the stage, the triumphs of the footlights--illusory, but so real in seeming, so satisfying and complete? Or Lionel--did he whip her straining fancies to a wilder effort toward the goal? Something of all these may have engaged her, for each was inextricably interwoven with the others. Lukos--Lionel--the sultan--Mizza--the Hedderwicks--the ambassador--a hundred minor characters, "supers" in the drama of her life, wheeled hither and thither, mocking, defying, questioning. The horrible lines of Wilde burned in letters of fire upon the wall: "Slim shadows hand in hand: About, about, in ghostly rout They trod a saraband: And the damned grotesques made arabesques, Like the wind upon the sand."