“It is a mistake,” she declared once, “to believe that a woman is ever serious unless she is forced to be.  All our natural proclivities are towards gaiety.  We are really butterflies by instinct, and we are at our best when we are natural.  Don’t you agree with me, Maggie?”

“From the bottom of my heart,” Maggie assented.  “Nothing but conscience ever induces me to pull a long face and turn my thoughts to serious things.  And I haven’t a great deal of conscience.”

“So you see,” Naida continued, smiling up at her host, “when you try to get a woman to talk politics or sociology with you, you are brushing a little of the down off her wings.  We really want to be told—­other things.”

“I should imagine,” he replied, “that my sex frequently indulged you.”

“Not so much as I should desire,” she assured him.  “I have somehow or other acquired an undeserved reputation for brains.  In Russia especially, when I meet a stranger, they don’t even look at my frock or the way my hair is done.  They plunge instead into a subject of which I know nothing—­philosophy or history, or international politics.”

“Do you know nothing of international politics?” Nigel asked.

“A home thrust,” she declared, laughing.  “I suppose that is a subject upon which I have some glimmerings of knowledge.  Really not very much, though, but then I have a theory about that.  I think sometimes that the clearest judgments are formed by some one who comes a little fresh to a subject, some one who hasn’t been dabbling in it half their lifetime and acquired prejudices.  Do you always provide strawberries for your guests, Lord Dorminster?  If so, I should like to come and live here.”

“If you will promise to come and live here,” he replied, “I will provide strawberries if I have to start a nursery garden in Jersey.”

“Maggie,” Naida announced across the table, “Lord Dorminster has proposed to me.  The matter of strawberries has brought us together.  I don’t think I shall accept him.  There are no means of making him keep his bargain.”

“He’d make an awfully good husband,” Maggie declared.  “If no one else wants me, I shall probably marry him myself some day.”

Naida shook her head.

“Lord Dorminster is more my type,” she declared.  “Besides, you have had your chance if you really wanted him.  I have a great friend in Russia who prophesies that I shall never marry.  That does not please me.  I think not to be married is the worst fate that can happen to any woman.”

“The remedy,” Nigel told her, “is in your own hands.”

Jesson, quieter than the others, was still an interesting personality, often intervening with a shrewd remark and listening to the sallies of the others with a humorous gleam in his spectacle-shielded eyes.  When at last the girls left them for a time, Nigel led the way at once into the library, where coffee and liqueurs were served.