“He’s not my hero,” objected Judy, “he’s Joe’s; and I’m sure he isn’t really surly.  I think he was disappointed at not seeing Joe.”

“Well, it was very ungallant of him when we turned up all right.  I have a good mind to flirt outrageously with him to punish him.  And when he’s deeply in love with me I shall say ’No, thank you, sir!  I’ve no use for surly squires, and I’ve a young man of my own at home.’”

“Georgie, you’re to do nothing of the sort.  You know I told you all about him to make you careful.  He was abominably treated by that cat Blanche, and I won’t have it happen again.”

“Well, I don’t suppose I shall have a chance.  I don’t suppose he’ll look at me.  I don’t think country bumpkins are educated up to my peculiar style of beauty.”  And Georgie stroked her ridiculous little nose with an affectation of content.

“Thank heaven you aren’t a beauty, or there’d be no holding you at all!”

“That’s just where you mistake.  If I were really pretty, instead of having a petit minois chiffone I should be able to sit placidly and leave it all to my profile.  As it is I have to exert myself to charm, and everyone knows charm is far more fatal to man than mere looks.  I am rather fascinating, aren’t I, in spite of my pudding face?  What was Blanche like, Judy?  Didn’t you see her the other day in town?”

“Yes, I met her at a Private View,” admitted Judy.  “She had sort of gone to pieces, if you know what I mean.  I don’t suppose it was a sudden process really, but it came on me suddenly.”

“What did she look like?”

“As large as life and twice as unnatural.  She had lost her ‘eye’ for making up, as they say everyone does, and the rouge stood out on the white powder so that you could see it a mile off.  She gushed at me, and I felt she wasn’t meaning a single word she said.  She had her husband with her and introduced him.  She even patronised me for not having one.  I didn’t say I’d sooner not than have one like hers, because she wouldn’t have believed me, and it would have been rude.  But he was a little wisp of a man—­a seedy little clerk.  She knew she couldn’t carry off the idea of having made a good match from a worldly point of view, so she murmured something to me about how beautiful true love was when it was the ‘real thing,’ and how she had never known what the meaning of life was till she met ‘Teddie.’  Do stop me; I’m being an awful cat!  But that woman aroused all the cat in me; she’s such an awful liar, and a liar is the worst of sinners, because he—­or perhaps more generally she—­is so absolutely disintegrating to the whole social fabric.”

“I suppose she must have been very fascinating once upon a time.”

“She was, though, oddly enough, men either hated her or were deeply in love with her, and as time went on the sort that were in love with her grew more and more fearful.  But it was young girls she attracted most.  I used to think her the most wonderful thing in the world, and I used to be enraged if I introduced her to anyone and they hated her at sight.  If one’s eye for making up gets out as one grows older, one’s eye for life gets a more and more deadly clearness—­unless you’re like Blanche, when I suppose you grow more and more incapable of seeing the truth.”