‘But you encourage them,’ said Delicia, passionately. ‘If you did not—’ ‘If I did not _pretend_ to encourage them,’ said ‘La Marina,’ composedly, ‘I should lose all chance of earning a living. No manager would employ me! That’s a straight tip, my dear; follow it; it won’t lead you wrong!’ But Delicia, with a smarting pain in her eyes and a sense of suffocation in her throat, was forced on by her emotions to put another question. ‘Stop—you make me think I have done you an injustice,’ she said. ‘Do you mean to tell me—that you are—?’ ‘A good woman?’ finished ‘La Marina,’ smiling curiously. ‘No, I don’t mean to tell you anything of the sort! I’m not good; it doesn’t pay me. But I am not as bad as men would like me to be. Come, let’s go into the drawing-room. Or shall I go first? Yes?’—this as Delicia drew back and signed to her to proceed—‘All right; you look _sweet_!’ And she swept her green and silver skirts out of the room, leaving Delicia alone to steady her nerves as best she might, and regain her sorely-shaken self-control. And in a few minutes the fashionable crowd assembled at Lady Dexter’s stirred and swayed with excitement as all eyes were turned on the sylph-like vision of a fair woman in gleaming white and jewels, with a pale face and dark violet eyes, whose name was announced through the length and breadth of the great drawing-rooms by the servants-in-waiting as ‘Lady Carlyon,’ but whom all the world of intelligence and culture present whispered of as ‘the famous Delicia Vaughan.’ For a handle to one’s name is a poor thing in comparison to the position of genius; and that the greatest emperor ever crowned is less renowned throughout the nations than plain William Shakespeare, is as it should be, and serves as a witness of the eternal supremacy of truth and justice amid a world of shams. *CHAPTER X* The first person Delicia saw after her hostess on entering the rooms was her husband. She bowed to him serenely, with a charming smile and playful air, as if she had only just left his company, then passed him by, entering at once into conversation with an artist of note, who came eagerly forward to present his young wife to her. Carlyon, quite taken aback, stared at her half-angrily, half-obsequiously, for there was something very queenly in the way she moved, something very noble in the manner she carried her proud little head, on which the diamond star she wore shone like Venus on a frosty night. He watched her slim figure in its white draperies moving hither and thither; he saw the brilliant smile light up her whole countenance and flash in her violet eyes; he watched men of distinction in art and statesmanship crowd about her with courtly flatteries and elegantly-worded compliments, and the more he watched her, the more morose and ill-humoured he became.