She did not know what a source of entertainment she was to Lady Maria, and how the shrewd, worldly old thing liked her.  Lady Maria Bayne was the cleverest, sharpest-tongued, smartest old woman in London.  She knew everybody and had done everything in her youth, a good many things not considered highly proper.  A certain royal duke had been much pleased with her and people had said some very nasty things about it.  But this had not hurt Lady Maria.  She knew how to say nasty things herself, and as she said them wittily they were usually listened to and repeated.

Emily Fox-Seton had gone to her first to write notes for an hour every evening.  She had sent, declined, and accepted invitations, and put off charities and dull people.  She wrote a fine, dashing hand, and had a matter-of-fact intelligence and knowledge of things.  Lady Maria began to depend on her and to find that she could be sent on errands and depended on to do a number of things.  Consequently, she was often at South Audley Street, and once, when Lady Maria was suddenly taken ill and was horribly frightened about herself, Emily was such a comfort to her that she kept her for three weeks.

“The creature is so cheerful and perfectly free from vice that she’s a relief,” her ladyship said to her nephew afterward.  “So many women are affected cats.  She’ll go out and buy you a box of pills or a porous plaster, but at the same time she has a kind of simplicity and freedom from spites and envies which might be the natural thing for a princess.”

So it happened that occasionally Emily put on her best dress and most carefully built hat and went to South Audley Street to tea. (Sometimes she had previously gone in buses to some remote place in the City to buy a special tea of which there had been rumours.) She met some very smart people and rarely any stupid ones, Lady Maria being incased in a perfect, frank armour of good-humoured selfishness, which would have been capable of burning dulness at the stake.

“I won’t have dull people,” she used to say.  “I’m dull myself.”

When Emily Fox-Seton went to her on the morning in which this story opens, she found her consulting her visiting-book and making lists.

“I’m arranging my parties for Mallowe,” she said rather crossly.  “How tiresome it is!  The people one wants at the same time are always nailed to the opposite ends of the earth.  And then things are found out about people, and one can’t have them till it’s blown over.  Those ridiculous Dexters!  They were the nicest possible pair—­both of them good-looking and both of them ready to flirt with anybody.  But there was too much flirting, I suppose.  Good heavens! if I couldn’t have a scandal and keep it quiet, I wouldn’t have a scandal at all.  Come and help me, Emily.”

Emily sat down beside her.

“You see, it is my early August party,” said her ladyship, rubbing her delicate little old nose with her pencil, “and Walderhurst is coming to me.  It always amuses me to have Walderhurst.  The moment a man like that comes into a room the women begin to frisk about and swim and languish, except those who try to get up interesting conversations they think likely to attract his attention.  They all think it is possible that he may marry them.  If he were a Mormon he might have marchionesses of Walderhurst of all shapes and sizes.”