‘Oh, what did she say to him?’ cried Maude.

’Well, I was about to say that all these subjects rather suggested frivolity.’

‘Besides, it really is a very absurd title,’ remarked Mrs. Beecher, who was fond of generalising from her six months’ experience of matrimony. ‘A husband to A wife’ would be intelligible, but how can you know what any husband would say to any wife?  No one can really foretell what a man will do.  They really are such extraordinary creatures.’

But Mrs. Hunt Mortimer had been married for five years, and felt as competent to lay down the law about husbands as about entrees.

’When you have had a larger experience of them, dear, you will find that there is usually a reason, or at least a primitive instinct of some sort, at the root of their actions.  But, seriously, we must really concentrate our attention upon the poet, for my other engagement will call me away at four, which only leaves me ten minutes to reach Maybury.’

Mrs. Beecher and Maude settled down with anxious attention upon their faces.

‘Do please go on!’ they cried.

‘Here is “The Pied Piper of Hamelin."’

‘Now that interests me more than I can tell,’ cried Maude, with her eyes shining with pleasure.  ’Do please read us everything there is about that dear piper.’

‘Why so?’ asked her two companions.

‘Well, the fact is,’ said Maude, ’Frank—­my husband, you know—­came to a fancy-dress at St. Albans as the Pied Piper.  I had no idea that it came from Browning.’

‘How did he dress for it?’ asked Mrs. Beecher.  ’We are invited to the Aston’s dress ball, and I want something suitable for George.’

’It was a most charming dress.  Red and black all over, something like Mephistopheles, you know, and a peaked hat with a bell at the top.  Then he had a flute, of course, and a thin wire from his waist with a stuffed rat at the end of it.’

‘A rat!  How horrid!’

’Well, that was the story, you know.  The rats all followed the Pied Piper, and so this rat followed Frank.  He put it in his pocket when he danced, but once he forgot, and so it got stood upon, and the sawdust came out all over the floor.’

Mrs. Hunt Mortimer was also invited to the dress ball, and her thoughts flew away from the book in front of her.

‘How did you go, Mrs. Crosse?’ she asked.

‘I went as “Night."’

‘What! you with your brown hair!’

’Well, father said that I was not a very dark night.  I was in black, you know, just my ordinary black silk dinner-dress.  Then I had a silver half-moon over my head, and black veils round my hair, and stars all over my bodice and skirt, with a long comet right across the front.  Father upset a cup of milk over me at supper, and said afterwards that it was the milky way.’

’It is simply maddening how men will make jokes about the most important subjects,’ said Mrs. Hunt Mortimer.  ’But I have no doubt, dear, that your dress was an exceedingly effective one.  Now, for my own part, I had some idea of going as the “Duchess of Devonshire."’