As for flirtations indeed, these are always going on in hotel life. Sometimes it is flirtation between a single man and a single woman, against which no one has a word to say on the score of propriety, though some think it will never come to anything and some think it will, and all scan curiously the signs of progressive heating, or the process of cooling off. Sometimes it is a more questionable matter; the indiscreet behaviour of a young wife, unprotected by her husband, who takes up furiously with some stranger met at the _table d'hôte_ by chance, and of whose character or antecedents she is utterly ignorant. This is the kind of things that sets the whole hotel by the ears. Prim women ask severely, 'How long has Mrs. So-and-So known Major Fourstars?' and their faces, when told, are a sufficient commentary on the text. Others, in seeming innocence, call them by the same name, and express intense surprise when informed they are not man and wife, but acquaintances of only a week's standing. Others again say it is shameful to see them, and wonder why some one does not write home to the poor husband, and speak of doing that kind office themselves; and others watch them with a cynical half-amused attention, interpreting their actions by the broadest glossary, and carefully guarding their wives or daughters from any association with either of the offenders. Whatever else fails, this kind of vulgar hotel intrigue is always on hand at sea-side places and the like; sometimes ending disastrously, sometimes dying out in favour of a new flame, but always causing discomfort while it lasts, and annoying every one connected therewith save the sinners themselves.