“Oh, dear! Strong enough for what, Iris?” “Everything,” she said, shrouding a boiled cherry in whipped cream. “Must get fat,” she explained as an afterthought. Now there were two red camellias painted on the left side of the crown of her hat--women at that time didn’t wear bowler hats, or, as they prefer to call them, _cloche_ hats--which was of the same colour as the sun, of straw, and with a narrow stiff brim. The two red camellias looked just as waxen and artificial as two real red camellias would look, and so it must have cost a power of money, that hat. She would have flown like the wind to Reboux in Paris, saying to herself: “I am in love. I must have a hat,” and so she had bought that hat. As for her dress that stifling day, you would have called it blue if you hadn’t seen that no colour made by hands could compare with the blue of those grave eyes, and it was of that fine texture which is finer than the texture of silk of China, if such a thing can be, and here and there upon its lower parts were worked large white arabesques in what looked to an uninformed eye like wool, but surely it could not be the fleece of the lamb that Iris was wearing that day? “And did Guy,” she asked, “say anything when you three saw me in that cab last night?” “Oh!” I said. She had very suddenly turned to me, so that at last I must look full into the eyes that blazed so incredibly blue from the shadow of the yellow hat ... and I, I could not meet those eyes! I stared instead at the emerald on the third finger of her right hand, and how white and frail that hand looked, so weak, so frail, when you thought of it as belonging to those deep, compelling, unscrupulous eyes. “Well?” It was her voice, faint, slightly husky; yet it rose above the roar of London and was lost in the clouds that pass over a strange, unknown land. “Personally,” I said, “I liked your silver turban very much.” “Dear, that was not a turban!” “Turban is a pretty word, Iris. And suitable, too....” “Turkey, polygamy?” “Just a boyish fancy.” “And Guy? You haven’t told me?” “But, Iris, he never, as you know, gives away gratuitous information. He just asked me to ask you to dine to-night, as I have done. ‘My idea, tell her,’ he said. In fact, he repeated that. And you’re coming?” “Why, of course!” she said absently, so absently. “But why do you ask about Guy, Iris? I fancied you didn’t care what any one thought.”