“But Lord Hurstmanceaux have never given me even good day, not even when he’s seen me in your own house, my lady.” “Don’t say ‘my lady.’ Can’t you break yourself of it? Of course, he’ll have to speak to you if he marries your daughter. I must get you all asked to some country house where he goes; the thing will come of itself. I’ll think it over and tell you where I send him.” She spoke as if she were telling her major-domo how many people she expected to dinner. Mr. Massarene naturally concluded that Hurstmanceaux himself was in the plot. He did not dare to object further, and temporized by dropping the subject. “But--but,” he said with a timid attempt to obtain a _quid pro quo_, “would you do one little thing to oblige me; would you--would you--not play, not gamble, any more in my houses?” He was intensely frightened when he had said it, but he felt that it might injure him with his coveted constituency if it were known that there was roulette, real roulette, in his drawing-rooms. Her eyes grew of a steely coldness, of an electric luminance, and seemed to transfix him as with barbed arrows. She threw away the end of her cigarette as she got out of her chair with that graceful abruptness peculiar to her. “I told you the other night, Billy, where _I_ am the house is mine. An Irishman said something like that I believe about the head of the table. Ronnie don’t play. He’ll do the policeman for you when he marries your daughter. Meanwhile, just let me alone, my good man, or you’ll be sorry.” Wherewith she carried her elegant person and her trailing black laces to the other end of the room where Fabian Delkass, the fashionable salon-singer, was tuning his great Spanish guitar and softly warbling fragments of Lassen. Mouse knew nothing about music and cared as little, but ditties softly warbled by a very good-looking tenor have attractions outside the science of melody; she could appreciate the talent of Delkass, because he never sung a note under twenty guineas each warble. She had sent him down to Vale Royal, she had arranged that he should receive ten times as much there as his usual terms for such country house engagements; in return Delkass, who was _beau garçon_ and very courteous to pretty women, would be sure to sing something charming at her own afternoons in London for nothing at all. She despised artists as a mere flock of sheep; silly edible obscure creatures; but as she ate a mutton cutlet for luncheon when it was very well cooked, so she nibbled at an artist now and then, when he was very much the fashion.