The talk at table was generally of horses and dogs, but sometimes it was of love, courtship and marriage, including conjugal fidelity, which was a favourite subject of ridicule, with both the women and the men.

Thus my husband would begin by saying (he often said it in my hearing) that once upon a time men took their wives as they took their horses, on trial for a year and a day, and “really with some women there was something to say for the old custom.”

Then Mr. Vivian would remark that it was “a jolly good idea, by Jove,” and if he “ever married, by the Lord that’s just what he would do.”

Then Mr. Eastcliff would say that it was a ridiculous superstition that a woman should have her husband all to herself, “as if he were a kind of toothbrush which she could not share with anybody else,” and somebody would add that she might as reasonably want her dentist or her hairdresser to be kept for her own use only.

After that the ladies, not to be left behind, would join in the off-hand rattle, and one of them would give it as her opinion that a wife might have an incorrigibly unfaithful husband, and yet be well off.

“Ugh!” said Alma one night, shrugging her shoulders.  “Think of a poor woman being tied for life to an entirely faithful husband!”

“I adore the kind of man who goes to the deuce for a woman—­Parnell, and Gambetta and Boulanger and that sort,” said a “smart” girl of three or four-and-twenty, whereupon Camilla Eastcliff (she was a Russian) cried: 

“That’s vhy the co-respondents in your divorce courts are so sharming.  They’re like the villayns in the plays—­always so dee-lightfully vicked.”

Oh, the sickening horror of it all!  Whether it was really moral corruption or only affectation and pose, it seemed equally shocking, and though I bore as much of it as I could with a cheerful face, I escaped as often as possible to the clean atmosphere of my own room.

But even there I was not always allowed to be alone, for Alma’s mother frequently followed me.  She was a plump little person in a profuse ornamentation of diamond rings and brooches, with little or no education, and a reputation for saying risky things in blundering French whereof the principal humour lay in the uncertainty as to whether she knew their meaning or not.

Nevertheless she was the only good-hearted woman in the house, and I really believe she thought she was doing a kind act in keeping me company.  But oh, how I suffered from her long accounts of her former “visits” to my house, whereby I learned, without wishing to, what her origin had been (the daughter of a London postman); what position she had held in Castle Raa in her winsome and reckless youth (one that need not be defined); how she had met her husband in New York and he had married her to save the reputation of his child; and finally how the American ladies of society had refused to receive her, and she had vowed to be revenged on them by marrying Alma to the highest title in Europe that could be bought with money.