Tallente was a little surprised.

“You mean that you don’t believe in woman Member of Parliament, doctors and lawyers, and that sort of thing?”

“In a general way, certainly not,” she replied.  “Women doctors for women and children, yes!  Lawyers—­no!  Members of Parliament—­certainly not!  Women were made for one thing and to do that properly should take all the energy they possess.”

“You are full of surprises,” Tallente declared.  “I expected a miracle of complexity and I find you almost primitive.”  She laughed.  “Then considering the sort of man you are, I ought to have gone up a lot in your estimation.”

“There are a very few higher notches,” he assured her, smiling, “than the one where you now sit enthroned.”

Nora glanced at her wrist watch.

“Susan dear, what time do you have to join your friends?” she asked.

Susan shook her head.

“Nothing doing.  I’ve got my seat.  I am going when I’ve had my dinner comfortably.  There’s fried chicken coming and no considerations of friendship would induce me to hurry away from it.”

Nora sighed plaintively.

“There is no doubt about it, women do lack the sporting instinct,” she lamented.  “Now if we’d both been men, and Mr. Tallente a charming woman, I should have just given you a wink, you would have muttered something clumsy about an appointment, shuffled off and finished your dinner elsewhere.”

“Our sex isn’t capable of such sacrifices,” Susan declared, leaning back to enable the waiter to fill her glass.  “There’s the champagne, too.”

The meal came to a conclusion with scarcely another serious word.  Susan departed in due course, and Tallente called for his bill, a short time afterwards, with a feeling of absolute reluctance.

“Shall we try and get in at a show somewhere?” he suggested.

She shook her head.

“Not to-night.  Four nights a week I go to bed early and this is one of them.  Let’s escape, if we can, before Mr. Miller can make his way over here.  I know he’ll try and have coffee with us or something.”

Tallente was adroit and they left the restaurant just as Miller was rising to his feet.  Nora sprang into the waiting taxi with a little laugh of triumph and drew her skirts on one side to make room for her escort.  They drove slowly off along the hot and crowded street, with its long-drawn-out tangle of polyglot shops, foreign-looking restaurants and delicatessen establishments.  Every one who was not feverishly busy was seated either at the open windows of the second or third floor, or out on the pavement below.  The city seemed to be exuding the soaked-in heat of the long summer’s day.  The women who floated by were dressed in the lightest of muslins; even the plainest of them gained a new charm in their airy and butterfly-looking costumes.  The men walked bareheaded, waistcoatless, fanning themselves with straw hats.  Here and there, as they turned into