“What has?”

“Her marriage.”

“Oh, her marriage.  She has told you about it?”

“My dear, she’s told everybody about it.  He was an angel; and he’s been going to marry her for the last four years.  I say, Wallie, do you think he really was?”

“Do I think he really was an angel?  Or do I think he really was going to marry her?”

“If he was, you know, perhaps he wouldn’t.”

“Oh no, if he was, he would; because he wouldn’t know what he was in for.  Anyhow the angel has flown, has he?  I fancy some rumour must have troubled his bright essence.”

Mrs. Hannay suppressed her own opinion, which was that the angel, wings and all, was merely a stage property in the comedy of respectability that poor Sarah had been playing in so long.  He was one of many brilliant and entertaining fictions which had helped to restore her to her place in society.  “And you really,” she repeated, “don’t mind meeting her?”

“I don’t think I mind anything very much now.”

The entrance of the lady showed him how very little there really was to mind.  Lady Cayley had (as her looking-glass informed her) both gone off and come on quite remarkably in the last three years.  Her face presented a paler, softer, larger surface to the eye.  Her own eye had gained in meaning and her mouth in sensuous charm; while her figure had acquired a quality to which she herself gave the name of “presence.”  Other women of forty might go about looking like incarnate elegies on their dead youth; Lady Cayley’s “presence” was as some great ode, celebrating the triumph of maturity.

She took the place Mrs. Hannay had vacated, settling down by Majendie among the cushions.  “How delightfully unexpected,” she murmured, “to meet you here.”

She ignored the occasion of their last meeting, just as she had then ignored the circumstances of their last parting.  Lady Cayley owed her success to her immense capacity for ignoring.  In her way, she lived the glorious life of fantasy, lapped in the freshest and most beautiful illusions.  Not but what she saw through every one of them, her own and other people’s; for Lady Cayley’s intelligence was marvellously subtle and astute.  But the fierce will by which she accomplished her desires urged her intelligence to reject and to destroy whatever consideration was hostile to the illusion.  It was thus that she had achieved respectability.

But respectability accomplished had lost all the charm of its young appeal to the imagination; and it was not agreeing very well with Lady Cayley just at present.  The sight of Majendie revived in her memories of the happy past.

“Mr. Majendie, why have I not met you here before?”

Some instinct told her that if she wished him to approve of her, she must approach him with respect.  He had grown terribly unapproachable with time.

He smiled in spite of himself.  “We did meet, more than three years ago.”