She had brought a “rattling good lot” with her; smart women and cheery men who could ride to hounds all day and play bac’ all night, or run twenty miles to see an otter-worry and be as “fresh as paint” next morning; people with blue blood in their veins, and good old names, and much personal beauty and strength, and much natural health and intelligence; but who by choice led a kind of life beside which that of an ape is intellectual and that of an amœba is useful; people who were very good-natured and horribly cruel, who could no more live without excitement than without cigarettes, who were never still unless their doctor gave them morphia, who went to Iceland for a fortnight and to Africa for a month; who never dined in their own homes except when they gave a dinner-party, who could not endure solitude for ten minutes, who went anywhere to be amused, who read nothing except telegrams, and who had only two cares in life--money and their livers. They came down to Vale Royal to be amused, to eat well, to chatter amongst themselves as if they were on a desert island, to carry on their flirtations, their meetings, their intrigues, and to arrange the pastimes of their days and nights precisely as they pleased without the slightest reference to those who entertained them. “What would you like to do to-morrow?” their host had ventured to say to one of them, and the guest had replied, “Oh, pray don’t bother; we’re going somewhere, but I forget where.” They had brought a roulette-wheel with them, and cards and counters; for their leader knew by experience that the evenings without such resources were apt to be dull at Vale Royal. William Massarene, indeed, had provided forms of entertainment such as were unattainable by the limited means of the Roxhall family. He had caused admirable musicians, good singers, even a choice little troupe of foreign comedians, to be brought down for this famous week in which the azure eyes of his divinity smiled upon him under his own roof-tree. But there was one diversion which she considered superior in its attractions to anything which tenors and sopranos, viols and violins, or even Palais Royal players, could give her, and that diversion she took without asking the permission of anybody. There was a with-drawing-room at Vale Royal which was always known as the Italian Room because some Venetian artist, of no great fame but of much graceful talent, had painted ceiling and walls, as was proven by old entries in account books of the years 1640-50, contained in the muniment-room of the Roxhalls. On the third night after their arrival, when they were all in this Italian room, after a short performance by the Parisian comedians, a long table of ebony and ivory was unceremoniously cleared of the various objects of art which had been placed on it, and the roulette-wheel was enthroned there instead by the hands of Lady Kenilworth herself, and the little ball was set off on its momentous gyrations.