Wives recover the loss of their husbands with amazing rapidity,—­ husbands “get over” the demise of their wives with the galloping ease of trained hunters leaping an accustomed fence—­families forget their dead as resolutely as some debtors forget their bills,—­and to express sorrow, pity, tenderness, affection, or any sort of “sentiment” whatever is to expose one’s self to derision and contempt from the “normal” modernist who cultivates cynicism as a fine art.  Many of us elect to live, each one, in a little back-yard garden of selfish interests—­walled round carefully, and guarded against possible intrusion by uplifted spikes of conventionalism,—­the door is kept jealously closed—­and only now and then does some impulsive spirit bolder than the rest, venture to put up a ladder and peep over the wall.  Shut in with various favourite forms of hypocrisy and cowardice, each little unit passes its short life in mistrusting its neighbour unit, and death finds none of them wiser, better or nearer the utmost good than when they were first uselessly born.

Among such vain and unprofitable atoms of life Lady Maude Blythe had been one of the vainest and most unprofitable,—­though of such “social” importance as to be held in respectful awe by tuft-hunters and parasites, who feed on the rich as the green-fly feeds on the rose.  The news of her sudden death briefly chronicled by the fashionable intelligence columns of the press with the usual—­ “We deeply regret”—­created no very sorrowful sensation—­a few vapid people idly remarked to one another—­“Then her great ball won’t come off!”—­somewhat as if she had retired into the grave to avoid the trouble and expense of the function.  Cards inscribed—­ “Sympathy and kind enquiries”—­were left for Lord Blythe in the care of his dignified butler, who received them with the impassiveness of a Buddhist idol and deposited them all on the orthodox salver in the hall—­and a few messages of “Deeply shocked and grieved.  Condolences”—­by wires, not exceeding sixpence each, were despatched to the lonely widower,—­but beyond these purely formal observances, the handsome brilliant society woman dropped out of thought and remembrance as swiftly as a dead leaf drops from a tree.  She had never been loved, save by her two deluded dupes—­Pierce Armitage and her husband,—­no one in the whole wide range of her social acquaintance would have ever thought of feeling the slightest affection for her.  The first announcement of her death appeared in an evening paper, stating the cause to be an accidental overdose of veronal taken to procure sleep, and Miss Leigh, seeing the paragraph by merest chance, gave a shocked exclamation—­

“Innocent!  My dear!—­how dreadful!  That poor Lady Blythe we saw the other night is dead!”

The girl was standing by the tea-table just pouring out a cup of tea for Miss Leigh—­she started so nervously that the cup almost fell from her hand.

“Dead!” she repeated, in a low, stifled voice.  “Lady Blythe?  Dead?”