“If you chose your friends from a rather more reputable set you would be doubtless less amusing, but there would be compensating advantages.”

Francesca snapped the remark out at lunch one day when she had been betrayed into a broader smile than she considered the circumstances of her attitude towards Comus warranted.

“I’m going to move in quite decent society to-night,” replied Comus with a pleased chuckle; “I’m going to meet you and Uncle Henry and heaps of nice dull God-fearing people at dinner.”

Francesca gave a little gasp of surprise and annoyance.

“You don’t mean to say Caroline has asked you to dinner to-night?” she said; “and of course without telling me.  How exceedingly like her!”

Lady Caroline Benaresq had reached that age when you can say and do what you like in defiance of people’s most sensitive feelings and most cherished antipathies.  Not that she had waited to attain her present age before pursuing that line of conduct; she came of a family whose individual members went through life, from the nursery to the grave, with as much tact and consideration as a cactus-hedge might show in going through a crowded bathing tent.  It was a compensating mercy that they disagreed rather more among themselves than they did with the outside world; every known variety and shade of religion and politics had been pressed into the family service to avoid the possibility of any agreement on the larger essentials of life, and such unlooked-for happenings as the Home Rule schism, the Tariff-Reform upheaval and the Suffragette crusade were thankfully seized on as furnishing occasion for further differences and sub-divisions.  Lady Caroline’s favourite scheme of entertaining was to bring jarring and antagonistic elements into close contact and play them remorselessly one against the other.  “One gets much better results under those circumstances” she used to observe, “than by asking people who wish to meet each other.  Few people talk as brilliantly to impress a friend as they do to depress an enemy.”

She admitted that her theory broke down rather badly if you applied it to Parliamentary debates.  At her own dinner table its success was usually triumphantly vindicated.

“Who else is to be there?” Francesca asked, with some pardonable misgiving.

“Courtenay Youghal.  He’ll probably sit next to you, so you’d better think out a lot of annihilating remarks in readiness.  And Elaine de Frey.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard of her.  Who is she?”

“Nobody in particular, but rather nice-looking in a solemn sort of way, and almost indecently rich.”

“Marry her” was the advice which sprang to Francesca’s lips, but she choked it back with a salted almond, having a rare perception of the fact that words are sometimes given to us to defeat our purposes.

“Caroline has probably marked her down for Toby or one of the grand-nephews,” she said, carelessly; “a little money would be rather useful in that quarter, I imagine.”