‘You must have had a dull evening,’ she said.

‘I was sound asleep most of the time,’ Margaret answered.  ’I’m afraid the Ambassador thought me very rude.’

’Because you went to sleep?  I don’t believe he even noticed it.  And if he did, why should you mind?  Nobody cares what anybody does nowadays.  We’ve simplified life since the days of our fathers.  We think more of the big things than they did, and much less of the little ones.’

‘All the same, I wish I had kept awake!’

‘Nonsense!’ retorted Lady Maud.  ’What is the use of being famous if you cannot go to sleep when you are sleepy?  This is a bad world as it is, but it would be intolerable if one had to keep up one’s school-room manners all one’s life, and sit up straight and spell properly, as if Society, with a big S, were a governess that could send us to bed without our supper if we didn’t!’

Margaret laughed a little, but there was no ripple in Lady Maud’s delicious voice as she made these singular statements.  She was profoundly in earnest.

‘The public is my schoolmistress,’ said Margaret.  ’I’m so used to being looked at and listened to on the stage that I feel as if people were always watching me and criticising me, even when I go out to dinner.’

’I’ve no right at all to give you my opinion, because I’m nobody in particular,’ answered Lady Maud, ’and you are tremendously famous and all that!  But you’ll make yourself miserable for nothing if you get into the way of caring about anybody’s opinion of you, except on the stage.  And you’ll end by making the other people uncomfortable too, because you’ll make them think that you mean to teach them manners!’

‘Heaven forbid!’ Margaret laughed again.

The carriage stopped, and Lady Maud thanked her, bade her good-night, and got out.

‘No,’ she said, as the footman was going to ring the bell, ’I have a latch-key, thank you.’

It was a small house in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, and the windows were quite dark.  There was not even a light in the hall when Margaret saw Lady Maud open the front door and disappear within.

Margaret went over the little incidents of the evening as she drove home alone, and felt better satisfied with herself than she had been since Lushington’s visit, in spite of having deliberately gone to sleep in Mustapha Pasha’s drawing-room.  No one had made her feel that she was changed except for the better, and Lady Maud, who was most undoubtedly a smart woman of the world, had taken a sudden fancy to her.  Margaret told herself that this would be impossible if she were ever so little vulgarised by her stage life, and in this reflection she consoled herself for what Lushington had said, and nursed her resentment against him.

The small weaknesses of celebrities are sometimes amazing.  There was a moment that evening, as she stood before her huge looking-glass before undressing and scrutinised her face in it, when she would have given her fame and her fortune to be Lady Maud, who trusted to a passing hansom or an acquaintance’s carriage for getting home from an Embassy, who let herself into a dark and cheerless little house with a latch-key, who was said to be married to a slippery foreigner, and about whom the gossips invented unedifying tales.