“Anything wrong?”

“Everything’s wrong.  I’ve just been having tea with Bill and his Mabel.”

“Oh, ah!” said Archie, interested.  “And what’s the verdict?”

“Guilty!” said Lucille.  “And the sentence, if I had anything to do with it, would be transportation for life.”  She peeled off her gloves irritably.  “What fools men are!  Not you, precious!  You’re the only man in the world that isn’t, it seems to me.  You did marry a nice girl, didn’t you?  You didn’t go running round after females with crimson hair, goggling at them with your eyes popping out of your head like a bulldog waiting for a bone.”

“Oh, I say!  Does old Bill look like that?”

“Worse!”

Archie rose to a point of order.

“But one moment, old lady.  You speak of crimson hair.  Surely old Bill—­in the extremely jolly monologues he used to deliver whenever I didn’t see him coming and he got me alone—­used to allude to her hair as brown.”

“It isn’t brown now.  It’s bright scarlet.  Good gracious, I ought to know.  I’ve been looking at it all the afternoon.  It dazzled me.  If I’ve got to meet her again, I mean to go to the oculist’s and get a pair of those smoked glasses you wear at Palm Beach.”  Lucille brooded silently for a while over the tragedy.  “I don’t want to say anything against her, of course.”

“No, no, of course not.”

“But of all the awful, second-rate girls I ever met, she’s the worst!  She has vermilion hair and an imitation Oxford manner.  She’s so horribly refined that it’s dreadful to listen to her.  She’s a sly, creepy, slinky, made-up, insincere vampire!  She’s common!  She’s awful!  She’s a cat!”

“You’re quite right not to say anything against her,” said Archie, approvingly.  “It begins to look,” he went on, “as if the good old pater was about due for another shock.  He has a hard life!”

“If Bill Dares to introduce that girl to Father, he’s taking his life in his hands.”

“But surely that was the idea—­the scheme—­the wheeze, wasn’t it?  Or do you think there’s any chance of his weakening?”

“Weakening!  You should have seen him looking at her!  It was like a small boy flattening his nose against the window of a candy-store.”

“Bit thick!”

Lucille kicked the leg of the table.

“And to think,” she said, “that, when I was a little girl, I used to look up to Bill as a monument of wisdom.  I used to hug his knees and gaze into his face and wonder how anyone could be so magnificent.”  She gave the unoffending table another kick.  “If I could have looked into the future,” she said, with feeling, “I’d have bitten him in the ankle!”