She was standing in the corridor twisting a lace wrap round her head, and he had come upstairs after the division to receive her congratulations and take her orders. “What I’d like to teach ’em is how to do the business of this ’ere House. Why, if any private business was carried on for half a year as the business of the nation’s done by these gentlemen, there’d be an almighty smash such as somebody’d go in the docks for----” “Tell the House so,” said Mouse, much diverted. He puffed out his cheeks, which was his equivalent for a smile. “Guess, my lady, ’tain’t the place for truth-telling.” “You should have gone to the other side.” He shook his head. “Not me, my lady. What do the Radicals say to me? This is what they say: ‘My good fellow, you’ve earned five shillin’s by sweatin’ all day; hand it over here, will ye. We want to buy beer and beefsteaks for Tom, Dick, and Harry, who’ve been sittin’ loafin’ on a wall over there while you was workin’.’ No Radicals for me if I know it.” “You are very delightful, Billy,” said his patroness, “and you may come with us to supper at the Papillons Club. I’m dreadfully hungry, though I have only been ‘loafin’’ behind a grating. I’ve made rendezvous there with Carrie.” He obeyed the permission of his enchantress; and meekly ate some oysters and drank some champagne in company with her and a dozen of her gayest associates; it occurred to no one of them to pay the bill, and the head waiter took it discreetly to the master of Harrenden House when no one else was looking. The Papillons was a new and very fashionable supper club, much resorted to after the opera, the theatres, and parliamentary debates. He felt that it was a place too full of gaiety, frivolity, and youth to be a meet place for a member of parliament and a Crœsus of his age and his ambitions. He thought suppers apoplectical, champagnes, even _brùt_, very poor stuff, and English oysters ridiculous; nevertheless, he went, and was rewarded by seeing his enchantress toss the liliputian bivalves down her rosy throat and turn her shoulder on him as she had done on his wife. To be sure, he had the privilege of paying the bill, a privilege which he found the English aristocracy always willing to concede to him. “There’ll always be people too proud to know me, will there?” he thought, as he drove homeward; “but I guess there’ll never be people too proud to let me pay for ’em.” CHAPTER XVIII. The giddy months frolicked away like youths and maidens dancing on a golden ground on one of Povis de Chavanne’s friezes. Flirting, laughing, gaming, waltzing, shooting, hunting, driving, dressing--above all dressing--the seasons succeeded each other with breathless rapidity for Mouse Kenilworth, and hundreds of fair women like her.