through all the organs, and if one of the great vital ones gets out of order the whole body is likely to suffer.  Suppose that Van Torp wished to do something with the Nickel Trust in Paris, and that I had private information to the effect that he was not a man to be trusted, and that I believed this information, don’t you see that I should naturally warn my friends against him, and that our joint weight would be an effective obstacle in his way?’

’Yes, I see that.  But, dear me! do you mean to say that all financiers must be strictly virtuous, like little woolly white lambs?’

Margaret laughed carelessly.  If Lushington had heard her, his teeth would have been set on edge, but Logotheti did not notice the shade of expression and tone.

’I repeat that the account of the interview with you was a mere incident, thrown in to show that Van Torp occasionally loses his head and behaves like a madman.’

‘I don’t want to see the letter,’ said Margaret, ’but what sort of accusations did it contain?  Were they all of the same kind?’

’No.  There was one other thing—­something about a little girl called Ida, who is supposed to be the daughter of that old Alvah Moon who robbed your mother.  You can guess the sort of thing the letter said without my telling you.’

Margaret leaned forward and poked the small wood fire with a pair of unnecessarily elaborate gilt tongs, and she nodded, for she remembered how Lord Creedmore had mentioned the child that afternoon.  He had hesitated a little, and had then gone on speaking rather hurriedly.  She watched the sparks fly upward each time she touched the log, and she nodded slowly.

‘What are you thinking of?’ asked Logotheti.

But she did not answer for nearly half a minute.  She was reflecting on a singular little fact which made itself clear to her just then.  She was certainly not a child; she was not even a very young girl, at twenty-four; she had never been prudish, and she did not affect the pre-Serpentine innocence of Eve before the fall.  Yet it was suddenly apparent to her that because she was a singer men treated her as if she were a married woman, and would have done so if she had been even five years younger.  Talking to her as Margaret Donne, in Mrs. Rushmore’s house, two years earlier, Logotheti would not have approached such a subject as little Ida Moon’s possible relation to Mr. Van Torp, because the Greek had been partly brought up in England and had been taught what one might and might not say to a ’nice English girl.’  Margaret now reflected that since the day she had set foot upon the stage of the Opera she had apparently ceased to be a ‘nice English girl’ in the eyes of men of the world.  The profession of singing in public, then, presupposed that the singer was no longer the more or less imaginary young girl, the hothouse flower of the social garden, whose perfect bloom the merest breath of worldly knowledge must blight for ever.  Margaret might smile at the myth, but she could not ignore the fact that she was already as much detached from it in men’s eyes as if she had entered the married state.  The mere fact of realising that the hothouse blossom was part of the social legend proved the change in herself.