Lady Caroline came to the club in Shaftesbury Avenue, and appeared to be wholly taken up by one great longing, a longing to get away from everybody she had ever known.  When she saw the club, and Mrs. Arbuthnot, and Mrs. Wilkins, she was sure that here was exactly what she wanted.  She would be in Italy—­a place she adored; she would not be in hotels—­places she loathed; she would not be staying with friends—­persons she disliked; and she would be in the company of strangers who would never mention a single person she knew, for the simple reason that they had not, could not have, and would not come across them.  She asked a few questions about the fourth woman, and was satisfied with the answers.  Mrs. Fisher, of Prince of Wales Terrace.  A widow.  She too would be unacquainted with any of her friends.  Lady Caroline did not even know where Prince of Wales Terrace was.

“It’s in London,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.

“Is it?” said Lady Caroline.

It all seemed most restful.

Mrs. Fisher was unable to come to the club because, she explained by letter, she could not walk without a stick; therefore Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins went to her.

“But if she can’t come to the club how can she go to Italy?” wondered Mrs. Wilkins, aloud.

“We shall hear that from her own lips,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.

From Mrs. Fisher’s lips they merely heard, in reply to delicate questioning, that sitting in trains was not walking about; and they knew that already.  Except for the stick, however, she appeared to be a most desirable fourth—­quiet, educated, elderly.  She was much older than they or Lady Caroline—­Lady Caroline had informed them she was twenty-eight—­but not so old as to have ceased to be active-minded.  She was very respectable indeed, and still wore a complete suit of black though her husband had died, she told them, eleven years before.  Her house was full of signed photographs of illustrious Victorian dead, all of whom she said she had known when she was little.  Her father had been an eminent critic, and in his house she had seen practically everybody who was anybody in letters and art.  Carlyle had scowled at her; Matthew Arnold had held her on his knee; Tennyson had sonorously rallied her on the length of her pig-tail.  She animatedly showed them the photographs, hung everywhere on her walls, pointing out the signatures with her stick, and she neither gave any information about her own husband nor asked for any about the husbands of her visitors; which was the greatest comfort.  Indeed, she seemed to think that they also were widows, for on inquiring who the fourth lady was to be, and being told it was a Lady Caroline Dester, she said, “Is she a widow too?” And on their explaining that she was not, because she had not yet been married, observed with abstracted amiability, “All in good time.”