So she only smiled, and said, easily:  “Dearest Jasmine, that umbrella episode which made me love Ian Stafford for ever and ever without even amen came after I was married, and so your pin doesn’t prick, not a weeny bit.  No, it isn’t Tynie that makes me sad.  It’s the Climbers who won’t pay.”

“The Climbers?  You want money for—­”

“Yes, the hospital-ship; and I thought they’d jump at it; but they’ve all been jumping in other directions.  I asked the Steuvenfeldts, the Boulters, the Felix Fowles, the Brutons, the Sheltons, and that fellow Mackerel, who has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it and twenty others; and Mackerel was the only one who would give me anything at all large.  He gave me ten thousand pounds.  But I want fifty—­fifty, my beloved.  I’m simply broken-hearted.  It would do so much good, and I could manage the thing so well, and I could get other splendid people to help me to manage it—­there’s Effie Lyndhall and Mary Meacham.  The Mackerel wanted to come along, too, but I told him he could come out and fetch us back—­that there mustn’t be any scandal while the war was on.  I laugh, my dear, but I could cry my eyes out.  I want something to do—­I’ve always wanted something to do.  I’ve always been sick of an idle life, but I wouldn’t do a hundred things I might have done.  This thing I can do, however, and, if I did it, some of my debt to the world would be paid.  It seems to me that these last fifteen years in England have been awful.  We are all restless; we all have been going, going—­nowhere; we have all been doing, doing—­nothing; we have all been thinking, thinking, thinking—­of ourselves.  And I’ve been a playbody like the rest; I’ve gone with the Climbers because they could do things for me; I’ve wanted more and more of everything—­more gadding, more pleasure, more excitement.  It’s been like a brass-band playing all the time, my life this past ten years.  I’m sick of it.  It’s only some big thing that can take me out of it.  I’ve got to make some great plunge, or in a few years more I’ll be a middle-aged peeress with nothing left but a double chin, a tongue for gossip, and a string of pearls.  There must be a bouleversement of things as they are, or good-bye to everything except emptiness.  Don’t you see, Jasmine, dearest?”

“Yes yes, I see.”  Jasmine got up, went to her desk, opened a drawer, took out a book, and began to write hastily.  “Go on,” she said as she wrote; “I can hear what you are saying.”

“But are you really interested?”

“Even Tynemouth would find you interesting and convincing.  Go on.”

“I haven’t anything more to say, except that nothing lies between me and flagellation and the sack cloth,”—­she toyed with the sjambok—­“except the Climbers; and they have failed me.  They won’t play—­or pay.”

Jasmine rose from the desk and came forward with a paper in her hand.  “No, they have not failed you, Alice,” she said, gently.  “The Climbers seldom really disappoint you.  The thing is, you must know how to talk to them, to say the right thing, the flattering, the tactful, and the nice sentimental thing,—­they mostly have middle-class sentimentality—­and then you get what you want.  As you do now.  There....”