She laughed.  “And I suppose the ones who do are on their way to see you?”

“Dolly, I’m ashamed of you,” he replied.

“Well, you’ve made yourself the reputation; don’t grumble at it or shirk it.”

“Shirk it?  Why should I?” He stood aside to let her pass in.  “I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.  I don’t wear the garment of respectability, but then I’m not stark naked.  Every man clothes himself in some article of faith, virtue if you like.”  The name of Sally and Sally’s face swept across his mind.  There was one virtue at least which he could put on.  “You people, the set you want me to join, the hunting set, the country house set—­all you wear—­I don’t mean you particularly.  God!  If you were like that!” He was too intent upon what he was saying to notice the smile of ice that twisted her pretty lips.  “All you wear is the big, comprehensive cloak of respectability, and sometimes you’re not particular whether that’s tied up properly.”

Dolly broke into low laughter.  “If you’d come down to Apsley,” she said, “one week end, I’d get a certain number of people down there, and when they are all congregated in the drawing-room after dinner, you could stand with your back to the fire, command the whole room and, at a signal from me, make that speech.  You’d be the lion of the evening.”

“What does being the lion of the evening mean?” he asked, with the ironical turn of the lip.  “That your bedroom door is liable to open, I suppose, and admit whatever lady is most hampered in the way of debts.”

“Jack!” She sat upright in the chair she had taken, eyes well lit with a forced blaze, breath cunningly driven through the nostrils.

“What?”

“How dare you talk to me like that?”

“Don’t know,” he replied, imperturbably.  “It is daring, I suppose, seeing that I’m not one of you.  You’d listen to that on the hunting field from a man whom you’d met once before.  But it was daring of me; I’m only your brother, and not in the crew at that.”

Her eyes glittered more vividly, the breath came quicker still.  Then it all blew away like sea-froth, and she shook with charming laughter.

“You talk like a Jesuit,” she said.  “Do you really feel those things as keenly as that?”

“Me?” He laughed with her and went for his pipe.  “I don’t feel them at all.  What’s there to feel about in them?  I only want to show you that I’m not totally ignorant of what your set is like, the set you want me to become a lion-of-the-evening in.  Lion-of-the-evening, beautiful lion, eh?  Have a cigarette?”

“Thanks.  Then why are you so hard on us?”

“Hard!  I’m not hard.”  He lit a match for her, watched by the light of it her lineless face, deftly made up with its powder and its dust of rouge, the eyebrows cunningly pencilled, the lashes touched with black.  None of it was obvious.  It was only by the match’s glare, held close to her face, that he could see the art that, in any less vivid an illumination, concealed the art.  He smiled at it all, and her eyes, lifting, as the cigarette glowed, found the smile and sensitively questioned it.