She went back to the piano when she was alone, and sat down on the music-stool, but her hands did not go to the keys till she was sure that Lushington was already far from the house.

A few chords, and then she suddenly began to sing with the full power of her voice, as if she were on the stage.  She sang Rosina’s song in the Barbiere di Siviglia as she had never sung it in her life, and for the first time the words pleased her.

  ‘... una vipera saro!’

What ‘nice English girl’ ever told herself or any one else that she would be a ‘viper’?

CHAPTER VII

Two days later Margaret was somewhat surprised by an informal invitation to dine at the Turkish Embassy.  The Ambassador had lately been transferred to London from Paris, where she had known him through Logotheti and had met him two or three times.  The latter, as a Fanariote Greek, was a Turkish subject, and although he had once told Margaret that the Turks had murdered his father in some insurrection, and though he himself might have hesitated to spend much time in Constantinople, he nevertheless maintained friendly relations with the representatives of what was his country; and for obvious reasons, connected with Turkish finance, they treated him with marked consideration.  On general principles and in theory Turks and Greeks hate each other; in practice they can live very amicably side by side.  In the many cases in which Armenians have been attacked and killed by the Turks no Greek has ever been hurt except by accident; on the other hand, none has lifted a hand to defend an Armenian in distress, which sufficiently proves that the question of religion has not been concerned at all.

Margaret accepted the Ambassador’s invitation, feeling tolerably sure of meeting Logotheti at the dinner.  If there were any other women they would be of the meteoric sort, the fragments of former social planets that go on revolving in the old orbit, more or less divorced, bankrupt, or otherwise unsound, though still smart, the kind of women who are asked to fill a table on such occasions ’because they won’t mind’—­that is to say, they will not object to dining with a primadonna or an actress whose husband has become nebulous and whose reputation is mottled.  The men, of whom there might be several, would be either very clever or overpoweringly noble, because all geniuses and all peers are supposed to like their birds of paradise a little high.  I wonder why.  I have met and talked with a good many men of genius, from Wagner and Liszt to Zola and some still living contemporaries, and, really, their general preference for highly correct social gatherings has struck me as phenomenal.  There are even noblemen who seem to be quite respectable, and pretend that they would rather talk to an honest woman at a dinner party than drink bumpers of brut champagne out of Astarte’s satin slipper.