“Because ‘Farleigh Court’ may lie dangerously close to ’Denzil Place’?  Be easy, Leo; the cold remains of my ossified affection will lie in as decorous repose as the harmless ash heaps of some long buried damosel of the era of Lars Porsenna, dug out of Vulci or Chiusi.  To make a safe and brilliant marriage is the acme of social success.  What else does the world to which I belong, offer me now?”

“There remains always, Alma, the alternative of listening to the instinctive monitors God set to watch in every woman’s nature; and we have the precious and inalienable privilege of being true to ourselves.  Better mourn your ‘bisc’ than stoop to a lower substitute.  Be loyal to yourself, be true to your own heart.”

“I know myself rather too intimately to offer a tribute of admiration on the altar of ego; and I prefer to make the experiment of trying to be true and loyal to some one else, with whose imperfections I am not so well acquainted.  When you meet your adorable ‘bisc’ in society, with a wife hanging on his arm,—­when as pater familias he convoys his flock of small children who tread on your toes at the chrysanthemum shows, what then?  The world, my world, is generously and munificently lax, and though the limits of respectable endurance may be as hard to find as the ’fourth dimension of space’, or the authenticity of the ‘Book of Jasher’, still for decency’s sake we submit there are limits of decorum; certain proprietorial domains upon which we may not openly poach; and mcum et tuum though moribund, is not yet numbered with belief in the ‘grail’.  Female emancipation is not quite complete even in America, and noblesse oblige! our code still reads:  ’Zeus has unquestioned right to Io; but woe betide Io when she suns her heart in the smiles that belong to Hera!’ Some women find exhilaration in the effort to excel, by flying closest to the flame without singeing their satin wings; by executing a pirouette on the extremest ledge of the abyss, yet escape toppling in; female Blondins skipping across the tight rope of Platonic friendship, stretched above the unmentionable.  You are shocked?”

“Indeed, I am pained.  I can scarcely recognize the Alma of old.”

“Wait one moment, I have the floor.  In the days when I wept for my—­ shall I say ‘bisc’? for impersonality is hedged about with safety, and the consolation prize had not yet been invited to come back from Coventry, a funny trifle set me to thinking seriously of my sin of covetousness.  One summer at a certain fashionable resort, let us call it villeggiatura of the Lepidoptera, the amusement programme had reached the last act, and people yawned for something new, when ‘sweet charity’ came to the rescue, and proposed an entertainment to raise funds for enlarging an ecclesiastical ‘Columbary’ where aged, unsightly and repentant doves might moult, and renew their plumage.  Musical, dramatic, poetic recitations, and tableaux vivants constituted the method of collecting the money, and the selections