“Tell you, Gwen; there is so little to tell. The lives of fashionable women are not so full of adventures as the lower classes seem to think. It is not for the things they do they should be blamed, but for all they do not do. There are a great many legends about Society women that are, in fact, but twaddly prose; there is a great deal of fuss all round a fashionable beauty, and very little worth fussing about. Spite and vanity are at the root of many rotten homes. I know my home was an arid desert, because my father never forgave my mother for having brought him to the altar; and she vented her spite on him by compromising herself with every man available or unavailable. The more my father showed his contempt to her, the more she threw herself into a vortex of frivolity. Her vanity could only equal her coldness. Her curse was to be incapable of any love. She never for one instant loved the man she inveigled into matrimony; she never cared a jot for her children, and she certainly had no passion, however ephemeral it might have been, for any of the men with whom she compromised herself. In this lies the ghastliness of such lives. Were there more _bona-fide_ passion, there would be less cruelty and less levity.” “Go on, Lionel.” “I never once saw my mother lean over the cot of her child; she rarely entered the nursery, and we only came down at stated hours to be looked at by visitors. These ordeals were painful. To appear motherly, my mother occasionally laid her hand on my curly head. Ah! those fingers scintillating with diamonds and precious stones; those hard bracelets penetrating into my delicate skin! How I loathed that hand on my head—it was such a hard hand.” “Poor Lionel, but you do not say how your little sister died.”