She remained in London May and June. Of course it was deadly dull, but people came to dine with her; she could dine with her very intimate friends; and men were in and out all day long from the Commons and the club and the guard-rooms; and she made a lovely picture in her floating crape garments, cut a little low round the throat _en bébé_, to show its white and slender beauty. Everyone felt bound to do their best to console her, and the task was a pleasant one even to her own sex, for her house, in a subdued discreet manner, was always full of agreeable persons, and softly buzzing with the latest news. When she drove in the park with her whole equipage turned into mourning, she had one or other of her golden-haired children always with her, and the spectacle was one which especially touched the policemen at the crossings, the old apple-women at the corners, the workingmen eating their bread and cheese on the benches, and all that good-natured, credulous, purblind throng which creates popular opinion. “Our public men don’t make up enough,” she thought, seeing the effect which she had on the multitude. “Napoleon’s white horse and Boulanger’s black one did half their business for them. The public should always be governed through its eyes and its appetites; our leaders of it appeal to its mind--a non-existent entity.” Black was very becoming to her. It is the surest of consolations to have a dazzlingly fair skin which crape adorns. Still death in the house is always tiresome; there are so many pleasant things which we cannot do. On the whole she thought it would have been better if Cocky had lived some little time longer. Cocky’s death had happened at an awkward moment. The London season was irrevocably lost to her. All her new gowns must remain shut up in their cases. There was nowhere in the known world (of society) where she could by any possibility dance and laugh and flirt and play cards, and go to races, and do theatres, and sup at restaurants, and generally amuse herself for the next six months. She did not care for conventionality, but there are things which no well-bred person can do; observances which the mere usage of the world enforces as it does the wearing of clothes, or of shoes and stockings. She was wholly unconscious of the benevolent intentions which Cocky had entertained toward her; she had never dreamed that he would think of causing a _cause célèbre_ in connection with her. She wished devoutly that he had lived for a year or two after his succession. The tutelage of Ronald was a prospect which appalled her.