Never a woman of easy friendships, Hector Brunton's wife before her elopement had possessed three distinct sets of cordial acquaintances--the "Moor Park lot," the "London lot," and the "Clyst Fullerford lot," as she phrased them. Of these, the "Clyst Fullerford lot" and the "Moor Park lot" (barring Colonel Sanders, the M.F.H., who, apparently untouched by gossip, greeted her, at walk with Ronnie down St. James's Street, in his cheeriest voice as "dear Mrs. Brunton") might, except for an occasional letter forwarded from Lancaster Gate via Mollie, have inhabited the moon. And with the "London lot" one never quite knew how one stood. Bachelor barristers inevitably lifted the hat and smiled. Hugh Spillcroft, meeting one alone at Harrods, invited one to tea with him and proffered a tentative sympathy which one gently but firmly rebuffed. Mrs. Needham, also encountered on a shopping expedition, pretended the most tactful ignorance, but forbore to inquire after one's husband. Sir Siegfried and Lady Moss, passing in their Rolls-Royce, looked politically the other way. Hector's particular friends one, of course, avoided; and, since she made no overture, one also avoided--a little hurt, perhaps, at the ingratitude--Mary O'Riordan. Taking it all round--as Julia Cavendish put it on one of those frequent afternoons when, always preannounced by telephone, the lovers came to tea with her--the situation held "little hope and less comfort." "And it'll get worse," said that indomitable old woman; "it's bound to get worse if you persist in hiding yourselves, if you go on refusing to meet anybody. Don't you see, my dear," she turned on Aliette with a little of her former brusquerie, "that you're playing right into your husband's hands? Don't make any mistake about _him_. He knows _exactly_ where you are; and, so long as there's no open scandal, so long as you remain tucked away in that abominable boarding-house, he'll leave you there. Whereas, if you'll only _make_ the scandal an open one, public opinion will force him to act. Take it from me, the only thing to be done is to flaunt yourselves." "Flaunt?" said Aliette. "Yes! Flaunt yourselves!" repeated Ronnie's mother, rather pleased with the literary expression. "I rather agree," said Ronnie. "That's the way Belfield broke Carrington. Dash it, we can't go on lying doggo forever. It isn't fair to Alie." Since their move to Powolney Mansions, Ronnie had begun to realize the exact difference in the world's treatment of a man's "lapse" and a woman's "adultery"; to perceive that he apparently was to be allowed to go on with his avocation, scanty though the emoluments of that avocation were becoming, as though nothing had happened; that his clubs and almost every house he had visited while a bachelor were still open to him as an unmarried husband, so long as the world, officially, knew nothing of his "unmarried wife."