And Praddy?  How did he fare in these times?  Praed felt himself increasingly out of the picture.  He was not far gone in the sixties, sixty-one, perhaps at most.  But out of the movement.  In his prime the people of his set—­the cultivated upper middle class, with a few recruits from the peerage—­cared only about Art in some shape or form—­recondite music, the themes of which were never obvious enough to be hummed, the androgyne poetry of the ’nineties, morbidities from the Yellow Book, and Scarlet Sins that you disclaimed for yourself, to avoid unpleasantness with the Criminal Investigation Department, but freely attributed to people who were not in the room; the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley and successors in audacity and ugly indecency who left Beardsley a mere disciple of Raphael Tuck; also architecture which ignored the housemaid’s sink, the box-room and the fire-escape.

The people who still came to his studio because he had the reputation of being a wit and the husband of his parlour-maid (whom to her indignation they called Queen Cophetua) cared not a straw about Art in any shape or form.  The women wanted the Vote—­few of them knew why—­the men wanted to be aviators, motorists beating the record in speed on French trial trips, or Apaches in their relations with the female sex or prize-fighters—­Jimmy Wilde had displaced Oscar, to the advantage of humanity, even Praddy agreed.

To Praed however Vivie took the bitterness, the disillusions which came over her at intervals: 

“I feel, Praddy, I’m getting older and I seem to be at a loose end.  D’you know I’m on the verge of thirty-seven—­and I have no definite career?  I’m rather tired of being a well-meaning adventuress.”

“Then why,” Praddy would reply, “don’t you go and live with your mother?”

“Ugh!  I couldn’t stand for long that life in Belgium or elsewhere abroad.  They seem miles behind us, with all our faults.  Mother only seems to think now of good things to eat and a course of the waters at Spa in September to neutralize the over-eating of the other eleven months.  There is no political career for women on the Continent.”

“Then why not marry and have children?  That is a career in itself.  Look at Honoria, how happy she is.”

“Yes—­but there is only one man I could love, and he’s married already.”

“Pooh! nonsense.  There are as many good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.  If you won’t do as Beryl did—­by the bye isn’t she a swell in these days!  And strict with her daughters!  She won’t let ’em come here, I’m told, because of some silly story some one set abroad about me!  And that humbug, Francis Brimley Storrington—­by the bye he’s an A.R.A. now and scarcely has enough talent to design a dog kennel, yet they’ve given him the job of the new stables at Buckingham Palace.  Well if you won’t share some one else’s husband, pick out a good man for yourself.  There must be plenty going—­some retired prize-fighter.  They seem all the rage just now, and are supposed to be awfully gentlemanly out of the ring.”