she was the victim of an experiment.  She felt like a school-girl about for the first time to appear in public in a long dress, and she was terribly afraid her husband would laugh at her.  If he had any such inclination, he courteously suppressed it.  He said the massive simplicity of this dressing of the hair suited her admirably.  Mrs. Lavender said that Paterson was an invaluable woman; and then they went down to the dining-room on the ground floor, where luncheon had been laid.

The man who had opened the door waited on the two strangers:  the invaluable Paterson acted as a sort of hench-woman to her mistress, standing by her chair and supplying her wants.  She also had the management of a small pair of silver scales, in which pretty nearly everything that Mrs. Lavender took in the way of solid food was carefully and accurately weighed.  The conversation was chiefly alimentary, and Sheila listened with a growing wonder to the description of the devices by which the ladies of Mrs. Lavender’s acquaintance were wont to cheat fatigue or win an appetite or preserve their color.  When by accident the girl herself was appealed to, she had to confess to an astonishing ignorance of all such resources.  She knew nothing of the relative strengths and effects of wines, though she was frankly ready to make any experiment her husband recommended.  She knew what camphor was, but had never heard of bismuth.  On cross-examination she had to admit that eau-de-cologne did not seem to her likely to be a pleasant liquor before going to a ball.  Did she not know the effect on brown hair of washing it in soda-water every night?  She was equably confessing her ignorance on all such points, when she was startled by a sudden question from Mrs. Lavender.  Did she know what she was doing?

She looked at her plate:  there was on it a piece of cheese to which she had thoughtlessly helped herself.  Somebody had called it Roquefort—­that was all she knew.

“You have as much there, child, as would kill a ploughman; and I suppose you would not have had the sense to leave it.”

“Is it poison?” said Sheila, regarding her plate with horror.

“All cheese is.  Paterson, my scales.”

She had Sheila’s plate brought to her, and the proper modicum of cheese cut, weighed and sent back.

“Remember, whatever house you are at, never to have more Roquefort than that.”

“It would be simpler to do without it,” said Sheila.

“It would be simple enough to do without a great many things,” said Mrs. Lavender severely.  “But the wisdom of living is to enjoy as many different things as possible, so long as you do so in moderation and preserve your health.  You are young—­you don’t think of such things.  You think, because you have good teeth and a clear complexion, you can eat anything.  But that won’t last.  A time will come.  Do you not know what the great emperor Marcus Antoninus says?—­’In a little while thou wilt be nobody and nowhere, like Hadrianus and Augustus.’”