Money grew scarcer, credit grew rarer, Billy became less easy to bleed, Harry seemed to grow duller and less good-looking, cabmen became shyer still of Cocky, and the old duke more unwilling to sign and sell; but she still all the same enjoyed herself, still carried high her golden head, and still crammed forty-eight hours into every twenty-four. Occasionally she did a little philanthropy; inaugurated a railway line, visited some silk mills, or laid the stone of a church. The silver barrow she received made a pretty flower-stand, the pieces of silk offered to her were also useful in their way, and when she had opened a church she felt she had a dispensation for months from attending church services. Only Egypt she could not manage this year. Egypt is a pastime which requires a good deal of ready money, and she had to console herself with hunting in the Midlands and shooting rocketers in the damp English woods; she did not really care about shooting, but she found zest in it because Ronald and the old duke hated the idea of women killing things, and even Brancepeth disapproved it. She went down again more than once to Vale Royal and went out with the hounds to whose maintenance her host had subscribed so liberally. But in February a long black frost sent hunters to their straw and riders up to town, and she opened her house in Stanhope Street as the session opened at Westminster. She had the children up also; partly because she was really fond of them, partly because children _poser_ you, and touch the heart and the purse-strings of your relatives. She disliked the town in winter; she wanted to be in Cairo or at Monte Carlo or Rome; but, being in London, she made the best of it and took her graceful person to any place where she thought she could be amused. There are many dinners in London when the frost binds the country in its iron bonds and the horses champ and fret in their stalls, and the herons starve by the frozen streams, and the dead kingfishers lie like crumpled heaps of broken iris-flowers on the cruel ice of their native ponds. “Has Billy run dry?” asked her lord one day when their financial difficulties were pressing more hardly than usual, and an unpaid cabman had threatened Bow Street. “No,” said Mouse curtly. “But the young woman is always there. She’s as sharp as a needle.” “Why didn’t you splice her to Ronnie?” “He won’t even look at her.” “How exactly like him!” said Cocky. “If there’s a thing he might do to oblige one he always kicks at it.” Hurstmanceaux always seemed to them odiously unfeeling and huffy; nevertheless, as they always did in their troubles, they sent to him to come and speak to them one day when their creditors had been more offensive than usual. He was so rarely in town that they agreed it was only prudent to take advantage of his being there for a week or two on account of evidence he had to give before a House of Lords Committee on an Irish land question.