“Not possible!” they would murmur—­“Lady Wicketts—–!”

“Yes,—­Lady Wicketts when she was young,”—­Miss Fosby would say mildly—­“She was very beautiful when she was twenty.  She is sixty-seven now.  But she is still beautiful,—­don’t you think so?  She has such an angelic expression!  And she is so good—­ah!—­so very goodl There is no one like Lady Wicketts!”

All this was very sweet and touching on the part of Miss Fosby, so far as Miss Fosby alone was concerned.  To her there was but one woman in the world, and that was Lady Wicketts.  But the majority of people saw Lady Wicketts in quite another light.  They knew she had been, in her time, as unprincipled as beautiful, and that she had ‘gone the pace’ more openly than most of her class.  They beheld her now without spectacles,—­an enormously fat woman, with a large round flaccid face, scarred all over by Time’s ploughshare with such deep furrows that one might have sown seed in them and expected it to grow.

But Miss Fosby still recognised the ‘Shepherdess,’ the ‘Madonna’ and the ‘Girl with Lilies,’ in the decaying composition of her friend, and Miss Fosby was something of a bore in consequence, though the constancy of her devotion to a totally unworthy object was quaintly pathetic in its way.  The poor soul herself was nearer seventy than sixty, and she was quite as lean as her idol was fat,—­she had never been loved by anyone in all her life, but,—­in her palmy days,—­she had loved.  And the necessity of loving had apparently remained a part of her nature, otherwise it would have been a sheer impossibility for her to have selected so strange a fetish as Lady Wicketts for her adoration.  Lady Wicketts did not, in any marked way, respond to Miss Fosby’s tenderness,—­she merely allowed herself to be worshipped, just as in her youth she had allowed scores of young bloods to kiss her hand and murmur soft nothings in her then ‘shell-like’ ear.  The young bloods were gone, but Miss Fosby remained.  Better the worship of Miss Fosby than no worship at all.  Maryllia had met these two old ladies frequently at various Continental resorts, when she had travelled about with her aunt,—­ and she had found something amusing and interesting in them both, especially in Miss Fosby, who was really a good creature,—­and when in consultation with Cicely as to who, among the various people she knew, should be asked down to the Manor and who should not, she had selected them as a set-off to the younger, more flippant and casual of her list, and also because they were likely to be convenient personages to play chaperones if necessary.

For the rest, the people were of the usual type one has got accustomed to in what is termed ‘smart’ society nowadays,—­listless, lazy, more or less hypocritical and malicious,—­apathetic and indifferent to most things and most persons, save and except those with whom unsavoury intrigues might or would be possible,—­sneering and salacious in conversation, bitter and carping of criticism,