Classic Audiobook Collection - My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon ~ Full Audiobook [comedy]

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon audiobook. Genre: comedy Many novels, most notably Hannah Webster's The Coquette, focused on how terrible it is for a woman to flirt before her marriage. 'I did not speak 20 sentences before sir Robert proposed to me', explained Lady Bidulph while teaching her daughter how to court properly in 'Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph'. A coquette must be a fool, wicked, and immoral. But Peggy is none of these. She sees things as they are, sometimes too much for her own good, and flirts with men she finds interesting. She decides to tell about them, from her point of view. The feelings, the reasons they did not keep in touch, and her 'notions' about them. This is her way to examine late Victorian society including the lives of other oppressed minorities. This novel is considered semi autobiographical For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:13:15) Chapter 02 (00:25:03) Chapter 03 (00:35:54) Chapter 04 (00:48:15) Chapter 05 (01:02:23) Chapter 06 (01:15:45) Chapter 07 (01:28:52) Chapter 08 (01:42:51) Chapter 09 (01:56:54) Chapter 10 (02:11:21) Chapter 11 (02:24:20) Chapter 12 (02:37:57) Chapter 13 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon 1 The first one The very first one Well, I almost think it was a sallow undersized Italian with handsome ox eyes Who used to give us violin lessons Or else it was a cousin, a boy with sandy hair Who stammered and who was reading for the army

But no, I rather think it was the anxious young doctor Who came when I had the measles Anyhow he, the primeval one, is lost in the midst of Antiquet. A great many people come to our house, and they have always done so as long as I can recollect. Father is a Royal Academission and paints shocking bad portraits, but the British public is quite unaware of the fact. The British public likes to be painted by a Royal Academission, so it pays large prices and is hung on the line in the big room at Burlington House. They all come, red-faced, red-coated MFHS, the bejeweled wives of Manchester millionaires, young beauties,

heads of colleges, the celebrities of the day. They all sit with the same fixed eyes and the same tight smile on the dais in our gorgeous studio. The studio is an imposing room. Father likes me to sit in the alcove with the golden mosaics on a peach-colored divan with turquoise blue cushions, and on show Sunday, Christina is seen in a little white gown in the oaken gallery, playing dreamy volunteers on the organ. It looks idyllic, and nobody knows that there has usually been a family rowe shortly before the people begin crowding in. Christina is tart of tongue and is not to be put down by a mere parent. But I was speaking of the studio. There is a perfection of detail about the vast apartment which is impressive. Indeed, so fascinating a workshop as father fashioned for himself

that I have seen a dozen people inspecting the barcades and spindle-legged tables and forgetting to look at the pictures on the easels. The overworked critics, too, about the beginning of April are apt to gush inordinately over an Ankin bowl full of daffodils, while they turn their backs on a portrait that has taken the best part of a year to paint. We live in a nest of artists. Next door they paint oriental subjects and hire a dusky Arab, more or less genuine, who wears a turban, and opens the front door at tea parties. A dozen yards farther up the street they supply the thoroughly English idol, young ladies in white muslin

sitting on September lawns, young gentlemen and riding bridges who are either accepted or rejected. Just opposite, they do see pictures, the old woman shading her eyes with her hand, the young woman in despair with a careless infant at her knee. And all the houses are of red brick,

with gables and whitewood balconies and queer little windows in unexpected places. Our front doors are painted a pale sea green with brass knockers and bellhand On show Sunday, the British public wanders in and out sublimely ignorant of whether it is the House of Smith R.A. or Robinson A.R.A. And yet ours is the only studio with an organ. During the season, we give Sunday dinner parties followed by an open evening, and we also entertain the sitters at lunch. Some of the sitters have been known to want to hear me play the violin. I play execrably, but they are too polite to say so. All this rather boars, gris whose latest hobby, socialism, takes up most of her time. Christina can be on occasion almost brutally cynical,

but then she is clever and when I want to get out of a scrape-eye go to her. Mother would not be of the faintest use under such circumstances. She would get pink and flurried and tell me that she married my father at 17 and settled down after that, and would further inform me that she had, no patience with such philandering. Poor mother. I really pity her limited experience. It must be like eternally dining off roast mutton to marry at 17,

and settle down dully and respectfully for the rest of your natural life. I was christened Margaret, but most people call me Peggy. It is a curious fact that all my friends call me by different names. Some call me Miss Winman, others Margaret, while Miss Peggy and Peggy do duty more often. One young man, but he was an American, always addressed me as Peggy Winman, a form of appellation by the by which usually prefaced a lecture. Gilbert Mandel called me Marguerite.

Gilbert Mandel is one of the deer departed. Not that he is dead. Oh, no. I call them the deer departed when it is all over and they have betaken themselves to India or Japan or to the East End to work among the people. It is not flattering to one's vanity, but it must be frankly owned that, as a rule,

my admirers, depart with phenomenal salarity. Their devotion generally lasts from six weeks to three months. Why this thing should be I cannot tell. Some people say it is because I don't let them talk about themselves. I really think Christina objected less to Gilbert Mandel than to any of those who have come after him. If he savored slightly of the prig, she maintained he was neither a knave nor a fool. Christina doesn't care for young men. My principal objection to him was that he was associated

in my imagination with drains. Of course, one cannot help the particular way in which one's parent has made a fortune, but, considering his son's taste for smart society and intellectual pursuits, it was thoughtless of Mandel Pear to poke his deodorizing powder in one's eye at every turn.

Poor young man! How he must have suffered! Mandel's superior pink carbolic disinfectant powder screamed at you, so to speak, at every street corner. The legend of its multifarious virtues was bit large on every omnibus. It flared in connection with a plump lady in full ball costume from every hoarding. Of course, there were lots of people, even when he was at Cambridge

who knew nothing of the deodorizer. But it always hung like a modern sort of Damocles over poor Gilbert's head. It made him diffident where he should have been at ease. It made him malicious when it would have been to his social advantage to appear kindly. But even at Cambridge he had given unmistakable signs of being a superior person. He could repeat, to a nicety, the shibboleth of superior people. He knew when to let fall a damaging phrase about the poetical fame of Mr. Lewis-Morris, and when to insinuate a paradox about the great and only Stendal. In art, he generally spoke of Velasquez and Degas. In music, only the tetrologies of Beirot were worth discussion. Mr. Mandel was a pessimist. That was what attracted me first, for at seven

a girl is always impressed by any cynical man of the world who will notice her. And Gilbert Mandel noticed me a good deal. He said I was suggestive, whatever that meant, and that my mind was receptive. And then he began to lend me books by Mr. Walter Pater, which I remember perplexed me very much. He also sent me George Meredith's novels, and there was even a volume of Schopenhauer,

I remember which I used to pretend I had read. In appearance, he was a middle-sumannibal. sized man of 34, with rather pink cheeks and a slightly bald forehead. His hands were fleshy and white and had exquisitely paired and polished nails. A manicure usually attended to his hands. He always had the newest scandal, and sometimes when he was going to say something specially malicious, he hesitated a little in his speech, not from any false shame, but because he was so delighted with what he was going to say. For the rest, he was always beautifully dressed and generally affected fashions which were coming in.

He had two secret ambitions, to dine with the Duchess and to write an article in the contemporary review. Looking back at it now, it strikes me that Gilbert Mandel had quaint notions about him using a young girl. He used to take us for long afternoons at the South Kensington Museum, where we gazed at Persian tiles and Japanese ivories, and illuminated missiles until my eyes ached, and Christina roundly declared she wouldn't stay another minute. Then Gilbert would look at us from under his drooping eyelids with a surprise little stare. He was never tired of art, and how Christina was bored. She came from a stern sense of duty, and because, as she frankly said, the thing wouldn't

do! Poor Christina, she was destined to see many such as Mr. Gilbert Mandel come and go. Other days it would be the National Gallery. He never went inside modern exhibitions of pictures in London, where I learned a good deal about Velazquez and Holbein and France Hals. It is from that period that my suspicion dates that Father does not know how to paint pictures. He came to our house a good deal.

Father laughed at his clothes and his manners, but said he was a sharp fellow, while Mother was amused with his little stories about smart society into which, by great assidavis, he had managed to effect a sort of entrance. In Mayfair, they knew nothing of the deodorizer. Mandel Sr. lived in a mansion in Surrey, where he cultivated orchids and pineapples and the world knew nothing of him. The son, on the other hand, had charming rooms in St. James, where he gave frequent tea parties, which were sparsely attended by a handful

of modish women interlarded with thin, youngish old men, who spent their lives criticizing the critics, and whose claim to immortality lay in a memoir. of lamb or coleridge. Somehow or other, these parties were not hilarious. The elements did not mix, and Mr. Mandel was a somewhat flurried, nervous host. The day that an ambassador's came to tea his distraction was almost painful. Gilbert Mandel was an example of that extremely modern mixture, a man of fashion and a critic. Indeed, his respect for smart women was only equaled by his adoration for the log rollers of the Saturday Review.

i have never made out to this day why he noticed me christina says he must have had a depraved taste for schoolgirls or else he thought by taking the raw material of a woman so to speak he might fashion a companion to his taste he tried hard to cultivate my mind he was always writing to me that was another odd thing about gilbert mandel an ordinary young man looks upon pens and paper with deep-rooted suspicion and distrust i have had more than one flirtation carried on solely by telegram. But Mr. Mandel was always writing me long epistles, very carefully worded and in a semi-literary style. I remember I was very proud of those letters. They flattered me in a young girl's most vulnerable point.

They implied that my opinion was worth having. I don't know whether it was that or as pronounced pessimism which attracted me most. He was also fond of implying, as he pointed out with a white hand, some masterpiece of the first. Florentine school, or sat murmuring paradoxes over the tea table, that there were places and things which we should see in the future together. There is a little town in Italy, Orvieto, he said

one afternoon when Christina and I had been listening to a disquisition on the Renaissance, where I must take you one day, Marguerite. You must see the facade of the cathedral. Orvieto is an education in art. It long remained vague, but one day, he was a little. He was aftiret. He was a It was a very wet day, I remember, and we were coming back in a handsome from the National Gallery. He alluded in a roundabout sort of way to an organ he was pleased to call his heart. Then it struck me all at once that it was impossible. It was not the deodoriser that I minded. I think it was the pinkness of his nails, and a certain complacent way which he had of regarding me,

which irritated me when it came to a question of a lifelong interview. I suppose I must have said no. and possibly with some fervor. Smiling vaguely, he took my hand. He evidently did not believe me. I won't hurry you, dear child, he said as he left me on my doorstep. You will think it over.

You will be able to make up your mind by and by. But I never made up my mind that I wanted to marry Mr. Mandel. Not long after he came to say that he was going abroad. At first he wrote pretty often, and as usual his letters were semi-literary, though to be sure the burning question was discussed from various points of view. But to my relief, the letters got more and more literary as time went on, and finally they stopped

all together. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 2 Perhaps it was by way of contrast to the superior person that I appreciated Tony Lambert so much, for a time. He was the most naive individual I have ever known. Indeed, his naivete quite disarmed me, and in a breezy boyish way he was diverting.

To be sure, he did not expect me to reach Schopenhauer, of whose existence I imagine he was but dimly aware, nor did he ask me to spend afternoons at the National Gallery. Kempton Park and the Gaiety Theatre were more to his taste, and while this sportive affair lasted, the house had a rollicking, youthful atmosphere, which was the result of something more subtle than Tony's ringing laugh, and Tony's skirmishing fox terriers, who invariably accompanied their master in his many visits.

We neither of us took each other seriously, and that added a certain charm to the thing. Everybody at home liked Tony except, I think Christina, who said she couldn't understand his slang and that he made a draft in the drawing room he was so boisterous and restless. The family saw a good deal of him,

in those days, for he was being painted in parade dress, and he used to stay to lunch so as to be able to pose again in the afternoon. I remember the first time he came in with Father, pink with mortification at being seen in his uniform in the daytime out of barracks. When scums, I wonder, the love of Mufti so deeply implanted in the rest of the British officer. Tony, fortunately, learned to forget his early sense of discomforture and spent many merry half-hours in our little study when he had done sitting, singing soldier songs with a fearful and wonderful accompaniment of his own invention,

while the dogs chased each other barking joyously over the sofas and chairs. How he used to light up the dim little twilight room with his scarlet bravery and his irrepressible spirits. Mr. Anthony Lambert was the eldest son of Norfolk people.

One day or other he would come into possession of a fine old house, some excellent shooting, and $3,000 a year, an income by means large enough to keep up the towers. Therefore, it was an understood thing, especially by Lady Marion, his mama, that Tony when he married was to marry money. In the meantime, Tony was to be painted, first to adorn the next exhibition at Burlington House,

and afterwards the collection of family portraits at the towers. So that in this way, the boy, in spite of Lady Marion's precautions, came directly under the influence of a most undesirable young person, to wit, myself. Tony was a lieutenant in a line regiment, and I fear his high spirits made him have occasional differences of opinion with his colonel. In appearance he was distinctly good to look at. He had a clean pink skin, twinkling blue eyes, and hair so flaxen that it was almost silver. His shoulders were broad and square. He had a delightful laugh, and he was just three-and-twenty.

And without being in the least conceded, Tony was thoroughly pleased with himself, his regiment, and his belongings. He had, in a supreme degree, the magnetism which comes of perfect health, good spirits, and complete self-satisfaction. What an infectious thing is happiness, and what a golden age is three-and-twenty. With what vigor did Tony play lawn tennis, how excited he got over races and cricket matches, how hot he became when he danced, what portentous suppers he could eat. The very sound of his voice in the hall, a voice with raised inflections, for the ends of Tony's sentences all.

finished joyously, roused one up on the foggiest and dreariest of days. To go for a walk in the park or a long piccadilly with Tony Lambert was a whole education in itself in the ways of young men. His joy was so manifest when a pretty face, a showy figure, or even a well-cut gown appeared in sight. He had the omnivorous glance which takes in every detail, and which is the prerogative of men who spend most of their leisure in sport. seldom will you find a writer, a lawyer, or a scientist with the faculty of observation as highly cultivated as in the most brainless individual used to the rod and the gun? Tony, by the by, was one of the young men with whom I corresponded by electric telegraph.

As a matter of fact, I do not possess a scrap of his handwriting. Whether he was doubtful of his prowess in grammar and spelling, or whether it was a bit of worldly wisdom beyond his ears, will remain forever a mystery. but Christina got quite tired of those agitated pulls of the bell which announced the telegraph boy, while at this period orange-colored envelopes were served up to me at every hour of the day. There was nothing he didn't offer us, from invitations to military balls, to bags of American candy. To me especially, he offered a great many photographs of himself in various degrees of military splendor, which gave my room, for the time being, quite a spirited and martial air.

Of course this didn't last long, for my photograph frames and space to put them are limited, whereas my friends are many, and in the course of years one frame contains many counterfeit presentments. Christina says that if I have a heart, it must be like my photograph frames. From what I could gather, Mr. Lambert was never in love with fewer than three ladies at a time. He was like one of the modern monster shopkeepers, a sort of universal admirer of the fairer sex. And yet one never blamed him for it, perhaps because he was so perfectly candid in his enthusiasms. As far as I could make out, the fair with whom I shared his affections at this time were his major's wife, a person with fluffy hair, an exaggerated figure, and a well-worn smile, and an individual whose acquaintance had appeared he had not yet succeeded in making,

but who occupied a distinguished position in the second row of the gay T-chorus. It was always amusing to get Tony on to the subject of his loves. The little friends that he, played with, seemed to have been of all ages and sizes, and his amorous difficulties appeared to have been numerous. Once already had his family offered a substantial sum to a young lady in the Camberwell Road as a substitute for Tony's hand. But that, as he acknowledged, with a pink and rueful countenance, had been in his gay and giddy youth. Having now arrived at the discreet age of Thonel,

three and twenty, he was resolved to mend his ways. And to begin well, he proceeded in his airy and irresponsible way to imagine that he cared about me. I wonder what Lady Marion would have said of the three months that followed. Tony took his long leave on January 1st, and it was at this time being a good deal in London that he sat for his portrait. For the next two months, Christina and I were never sure when he would not burst into Ardenne with his joyous laugh, and a couple of excited dogs wagging to live. lighted tails, with some project of rushing us off somewhere or other in search of amusement. What would Lady Marion have said to all this, I wonder?

And of those many accidental meetings in Bond Street, when we used to drop in at the minor exhibitions, and come out sublimely unconscious of whether we had been looking at Van Beers or Gustave Dore, or of the pompous dances in Queen's Gate, to which mother allowed me to take the boy, and where he met, I believe, for the first time in his life, the youth and loveliness of South Kensington. Tony had met county girls and garrison girls and gaiety girls, but I don't think he had ever before danced with a London middle-class damsel. Lady Marion, I verily believe, would have preferred the young person in the Camberwell Road.

But our last dance was not to be in Queen's Gate. The regiment was ordered to the Courage, and Tony was in despair. Nothing would do but we must come to the regiment's farewell ball at Malchester, and it was there in the long, low rooms of the officer's mess, against a background of flags and military trophies that I saw Tony's blonde head for the last time. The pretty scene comes back to me now, the glare of scarlet coats among the flesh tones of the women,

the delicate tinted-tool dresses against a bank of pink azaleas and palms, the blue uniforms of the gunners and the green of the rifles striking a somber note in the gay cord of color. The intimate sadness of those valsry-furt, which the band of the regiment played, and over all that acute atmosphere of mixed pain and pleasure which is associated, when one is eighteen, with the words, for the last time. It was my first soldier's ball. How well I remember the whole atmosphere of that night. The Colonel, smiling, urbane, and slightly indifferent, the Colonel's wife, a lady with

protruding teeth and neatly parted hair, who was said to be wealthy. The eager young faces of the junior subalterns as they surrounded some showy beauty. The heavy-jawed captain to whom I was introduced on my entry and who deserted me at once for a buxom lady with dubious hair and many diamonds. Oh, those military ladies! How dashing, how much too dashing they were. What drawn in waists, what liberal smiles, what suspiciously white shoulders.

How pert and offhand they seemed in public, and how confiding they looked in obscure corners down back-past. passages where Tony's straw-colored hair and scarlet coat were to be seen often during that night. Heaven has not been pleased to inflict on me a suspicious disposition, or I fear I should have passed but an indifferently amusing evening. For Mr. Anthony Lambert, with the gay insouciance of youth, had thoughtlessly invited some half-dozen of his loves, and his major's wife, it appeared, was inordinately jealous. Some fifteen years ago, this lady had been described in a local newspaper as a magnificent blonde, and she had been living up to the epithet ever since.

She had all the airs of a beauty, and she seemed to regard Mr. Lambert as her especial property. At ten o'clock I heard her reproaching him for only wanting three dances. At one o'clock, she deliberately fetched him out of a balcony where he was saying goodbye to a pretty little girl with red hair. I don't wonder that Tony looked harassed. The smile of his major's wife was terrifying. poor boy. I at least had never worried or reproached him, and I think he was proportionately grateful at the last.

It was a black night and pouring rain, I remember, when we finally drove away, but I could see that Tony's blue eyes looked unspeakable things as we whispered a final hurried goodbye at the carriage door. One morning a few months later, we read in the paper that a marriage had been arranged and would take place immediately, between Mr. Anthony Lambert of the Blankshire Regiment,

eldest son of Mr. and Lady Marion Lambert of the Towers, sleeping to Norfolk, and Catherine, eldest daughter of Patrick O'Flaherty, Asquire, of Dublin. He had been taken seriously by a Garrison Beauty

a dozen years older than himself. Although they have already three children, I hear that Lady Marion refuses to see her enterprising Irish daughter-in-law and now the regiment is in India.

Poor Tony! He was born it would appear to be the sport of the less amiable members of our sex. His Major's wife is, of course, with the regiment, and people say that Mrs. Anthony Lampert is primitively jealous. A ridiculous song that he used to strum always occurs to me when I think of him, for the refrain,

Woman, Lovely Woman, epitomizes the tragicomody of his blameless little life. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. three it is with an uneasy conscience that i recall the brief episode of mr hanbury price there used to be a derisive ring in christina's voice when she alluded to mr price as my new young man she knew well enough that he could not by the wildest stretch of imagination be called young neither to be sure was he in the sear and yellow leaf no he was worse than old he was middle-aged middle-aged in ideas rather than in person for he affected a jauntiness of attire which he was able to carry off to a certain extent being rather big with high color and having hair still untouched with gray he also liked to be thought what in early victorian novels would have been called an agreeable rattle but then half of mr price's conversation consisted of projects and invitations which somehow never came off it was wonderful what a reputation for festive hospitality mr price had among people who didn't know him well

One of his least agreeable idiosyncrasies was his curious distrust of everybody. He was always in dread of being, as he would have expressed it, done. So suspicious indeed was he that he even suspected himself. His coup on the stock exchange, the bouquet had offered overnight. The very wine he drank, suggested the afterthought that he had made a fool of himself, that it was possible he might not yet get the desired return for his money. His small, red-lidded eyes of a watery blue continually betrayed this recurring idea,

while his loosely hung jaw and mouth gave signs of a loquacious temperament which his frequent and abrupt laugh did not succeed in making genial. Though he did not mention it in polite society, Mr. Hanbury Price hailed from Tulse Hill. In that eminently respectable suburb, he had first seen the light, and in the same stucco mansion there still resided his mother and a bevy of plain unmarried sisters,

to whom he used to journey down to partake of early dinner on Sundays. Never mentioned Tulse Hill to smart people. He confided to me one day with one of his sudden and unmerthful laughs. If I do, they want to know if it's in Yorkshire. He was curiously anxious to be voted popular, at least among the right sort of people, and was fond of alluding, in an airy way, to the parties he had given or intended to give.

But, as he had an inherent dislike to laying out half a crown on anything which was not strictly necessary, Mr. Price must have undergone untold tortures. If, indeed, these festivities ever really came off, in his efforts to be classed among the bachelors who entertain. Of course, it was only in time that I became aware of all these amiable little peculiarities, for, at first sight, Mr. Price gave one the impression of being a good-natured, talkative, and gregarious member of society, with an inclination for giving little dinners and theatre parties. We met him first on a Saturday to Monday, on the river at the house of a vulgar little woman whose portrait father was painting.

Mrs. Bodley Gallard was loud in his praises. She had, it transpired, only known Mr. Hanbury Price a fortnight. Our hostess was one of those over-officious people who say things that make one's blood run cold. Now, my dear Miss Winman, she whispered to me on Sunday night after dinner, please be nice to the poor young man. Mrs. Bodley Gallard belonged to the class of person who cause everybody a young man who is still unmarried, even though he be on the wrong side of 50. I assure you he is devoted, quite devoted. Now promise me you'll think about it. A speech which had the effect of making me extremely rude to Mr. Price when he joined me after dinner, and it was only when he had seen us into our cab at Paddington Station next morning that

I mentioned after he had made repeated inquiries on the subject that we were generally at home at five o'clock. He was not long in coming, and when he appeared he was profuse in his invitations. Would we do a theater? Would we dine with him? He was thinking of taking a house on the river for August. He hoped that mother would bring us down to stay with him. The least we could do was to accept his offer for the play. We were to dine somewhere first, and the party was arranged for the following Tuesday. But when Tuesday arrived, there was a postcard for Mr. Price to say that the proposed festivity was postponed, and as I afterwards found out, because he had been vainly soliciting free admissions for the Thalaya Theatre from a young man

whom he knew who played the footman in the first piece. Then, when the night at last arrived, we found we were to partake of a three-and-six-penny tabledote dinner with a maddening accompaniment of Glees, and this from a man who talked continually of the amphitrian and the bachelor's club. That damped my spirits to begin with. Of course, when one is under twenty, one does not care much for the niceties of cooking and the brand of the champagne, but it is lowering to one's dignity in the eyes of one's family to be asked to dine a tablodote with traveling Yankees and gaping provincials. But it was nothing to what followed. We were a party of five, mother and I and a couple of men beside our host. When we were at last

landed inside the doors of the Thalaya, we found that Mr. Hanbury Price had secured seats for his party in the fourth row of the dress circle. The two other men exchanged amused in surprised glances. Mother and I declared we much preferred the dress circle to a box or stalls. And Mr. Price, who began to dimly discern that for once his economy was ill-timed, spent half his evening in the lobby, having, as I shrewdly suspect, a prolonged altercation with the attendant on the subject of a charge of sixpence for each program. It grieves me to think what we must have cost Mr. Hanbury Price and Hansoms for our house

as he more than once explained, is inconveniently situated from omnibuses. Whether he really imagined himself to be in love, I have never been able to decide, but he was obviously haunted by dreadful forebodings as to the expense of a young lady with my tastes and proclivities. He used to lecture me about taking care of my gowns and suggested that I was recklessly extravagant in the matter of feather boas and shoes. One day he tried to persuade me to attend the cookery classes at South Kensington, and another evening when he was unusually sentimental, he asked me if I didn't like the neighborhood of Notting Hill.

All this contributed to Christina's joy, for Mr. Price's struggles between economy and the tender passion were really diverting to behold. I think perhaps when I look back at the whole affair dispassionately that it was the box of chocolates that ended Mr. Hanbury Price's dream. One afternoon when we had been particularly confidential, he asked me at parting if I cared for sweets. the next day there arrived from the civil service stores a small cardboard box of second-rate chocolate creams addressed to me to me who had had qualms of conscience that he might have telegraphed to paris for some elaborate offering from the boulevard des italien telegraphed indeed

hanbury price was not the man to waste his money in telegrams when a letter or better still a halfpenny postcard would answer the same purpose i have quite a collection of postcards in his handwriting for he wrote often on every sort of man matter, and he chiefly used the cheapest means of communication. There is the mass of postcards, for instance, which relates to the famous dinner at the Crystal Palace, which finally ended the affair. We tried hard to get out of it, Christina and I, but it was of no avail, and in the end we had to go. Mrs. Bodley Gallard was to be the chaperone, and there were to be one or two other men. I like to go over the events of that day, for they are unique in my history.

Five o'clock was the hour of meeting at Victoria Station. It was high midsummer and bitterly cold and damp. Arrived at the station, we found that Mr. Price had already taken second-class tickets for the whole party, but that he was not above recouping himself from our purses for this outlay. Just as jolly second-class, declared our host, If you're a party, don't you know? Though he laughed awkwardly when he found that a couple of damp, plush-clad babies with their respective mamas were also to journey down with us to sit in them.

Of course, we arrived too early, and wandered about on the interminable and dubious boards of the palace among pieces of greasy paper, the remnants of recent feasts, until seven o'clock. But dinner came at last, with a lengthy harangue as to which table Mr. Price had selected, an interview with the manager, and some sour Sotern cup. Only one young man had turned up. The other two had probably dined with Mr. Price before, and and he chaffed our host into ordering a beverage more suitable to the damp night. But even that failed to revive the flagging spirits of the party. Mornful pauses fell, and Hanbury Price's eye traveled anxiously after the champagne bottle

as it went its way round the table. Even Mrs. Bodley Gallard could not pretend that she was enjoying herself. And then, with the phenomenally hard peaches and dried figs, came the final blow. There were to be fireworks, but our host had a half. evidently no intention of offering us covered seats from which to view them. One of you young ladies will come with me in the grounds, urged the ever-economical Hanbury, casting a sentimental and meaning glance in my direction. I'm afraid I've caught cold already, I said with decision.

And then Christina, with true nobility, came to my rescue in answer to my appealing nudge. I will, if you like, she said quickly. Peggy can't wander about in the dark in the cold tonight. She's nearly got bronchitis as it is. The child must stay indoors. The only young man at once secured seats for the chaperone and myself, and Mr. Hanbury Price spent what he may have intended to be the eventful night of his life, wandering about the grounds under a dripping umbrella with my sister.

Christina's account of the evening is extremely diverting. I shall always be grateful to her for that night. Whatever differences may arise between us and after years, I shall never forget from what an awkward interview Christina saved me. And he, for his part, had a chastened air in the railway carriage coming home. We left town very soon after, and when I meet Mr. Hanbury Price on rare occasions in the park or at some crowded party, I get ready my sweetest and most deceitful smile. But Mr. Hanbury Price invariably looks the other way.

End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon This Librevox recording is in the public domain 4 The gleam of velvety grass through a grey cloister A bare oaken staircase leading to a low room lined with books A cushioned window seat, a summer night And the distant sound of someone playing the violin

These are the things that come back to me Whenever anyone pronounces the name of Frank Harding It was at Oxford at Commemoration that I saw him first. He was lying on his back, on the grass, in one of those small, meager gardens in the parks which make the joy of Oxford dons and their wives and their troops of babies. As a matter of fact, he was being photographed. We were all being photographed, as is the pleasing custom during Commemoration Week. We had gone to pay a call on the Talford Browns.

Talford Brown is the most eminent authority on the Phoenician language in Oxford, and we had been at once taken into the garden where T and the photographer's camera awaited us. There we found the usual Oxford group. The lady with smooth hair and clinging gown, one or two vague bearded fellows or tutors, the girl in a pay-s-ne and badly-made boots, a couple of small boys, two babies, three dogs, and Frank.

Flat on his back, as I said before, his six-foot-one of length arrayed in virgin flannels and a Trinity College blazer. Frank Harding was one of those exceptional beings, an undergraduate on easy, nay, even familiar terms with Don's. The wives of these gentlemen were very tolerant of Frank. Indeed, if it were given to a Don's wife to be capable of a flirtation, I am pretty sure they would have flirted with him.

As it was, he strolled in and out of those villas in Norham Gardens very much as he liked, played with the babies, teased the dogs, and helped the ladies of the house in their perennial little difficulties with the syntax. In spite of his eccentricities and those daring caricatures of the dawns of his which regularly appeared in Shrimpton's window, the authorities all liked Frank, and everybody was ready to bet, if one can picture such a transaction taking place in a college common room that Frank would take a first. We stayed to dinner at the Talford Browns, and we were much struck with the somewhat affected simplicity of the Oxford

interior. There was a long table, sparsely decorated with attenuated glass, and flower holders, in each of which were placed three Iceland poppies. Mrs. Talford Brown, who had the reputation of being a wit and was understood to say scathing things about the undergraduates, herself carved the cold mutton which formed the principal dish at dinner. Professor Talford Brown drank toast and water. We had a salad, with a trifle too much vinegar, and we talked a good deal of the higher education of women and of the recent finals for honors which had just come off. Christina sat next to the professor, and I could see that our host and hostess were as much

taken with her as it is possible for Oxford people to be with a mere Londoner, and this was an inexpressible relief to me. For every minute I felt that I was falling lower in their regard. An irresistible impulse seized me to say frivolous things, to giggle in an imbecile manner, and to ask Mrs. Telford Brown if she had ever been to the empire. Do what I may in the After years, I know that I shall ever be regarded with contempt in those Oxford circles in which, plain living and high thinking, obtained. But Frank Harding, who sat next to me by no means shared this opinion. To begin with, we recollected that we were, so to speak, old friends. We remembered that it had taken two nurses and a governess to make peace between us some fifteen years ago, when we

had met at a children's party and found no favor in each other's eyes. The Hardings, indeed, were connections of my mothers, so that we had seen Frank now and then up to the trying age of eight. But after that, they had gone to live in the country, and we had lost sight of them for years. But on the strength of my having pulled his hair some dozen years ago, Frank, in his unconventional and airy way, insisted on calling us Christina and Peggy. After dinner, Mrs. Talford Brown went up to put the twins to bed. Nothing was ever allowed to interfere with this domestic right, and then we all sat in the ugly little square garden and watched a great yellow moon travel slowly up the sky.

And Frank Harding talked. He was as far removed from the ordinary football-playing young man as it is possible to be. To begin with, his father was a poet, one of our finest latter-day lyricists, and it was from him that he inherited all his sympathy, his feminine intuitions, and his charmingly impracticable theories.

At present, of course, he was only a cleverer, somewhat lanky boy, but his beautiful gray eyes made him almost handsome, and his perfectly easy manners were curiously attractive. He had the wildest ideas, and was the sort of man who might found a new religion, commit a murder, devote a lifetime to the East End, or take away his neighbor's wife and write a book to prove that his action was justified. Some years have passed since then, but I shall never be astonished to hear anything of Frank Harding, except that he had gone into the city and was paying taxes in Bayswater. We saw a great deal of Frank in the days that followed.

To enjoy commemoration, one must be twenty, and never have stayed in Oxford before. It was astonishing how much we managed to get into that week and how much of Frank's society we had. There were lazy mornings, punting on the chairwell, and picnics to Godstow in Sanford Lashire, the ball at Christchurch, and the garden parties in the colleges, for which we put on our bed, best frocks and stare to the celebrities, and then hurried home to a cozy tea in our rooms, where a dozen undergraduates fought decorously for the honor of handing the teacups. And then the endless strawberries, the valsas that were quarreled for, the unstinted devotion of the boys.

I am old-fashioned enough to like a young man to be in love. Even if his passion burns for someone else, one likes to see it, and it is still more interesting when the young man expends his ardor on oneself. So Frank fell in love with me, and I liked it. I remember it all as if it were yesterday. There is the sad-colored June day, a harmony in soft grays and greens, when we want to pick fritillaries in Mesopotamia.

It was the day after commemoration was over, and the narrow, willow-fringed river was deserted. Far off, we could see the gray spires and towers of the university against the wide white sky, while across the fat buttercup gilded meadows came the mellow distant sound of Oxford bells. As Frank pushed the punt lazily upstream, we seemed wrapped in a mysterious green silence. We left the punt where the old chain fairy crosses the churwell and plunged into the long new grass. I carried a basket for the fritillaries and Frank had brought an empty soda-water bottle,

a proceeding which puzzled me immensely, until I found that all among the abundant grass studded with June flowers, their leapt and danced hundreds of tiny, nimble, gay-hearted frogs, only lately emerged from the juvenile or tadpole state. They are so like undergraduates, I cried, kneeling in the long grass and stretching to predatory fingers here and there, while Frank pretended to be offended, and declared I shouldn't put any of my frogs into his soda-water bottle. But in the end we compromised,

and Frank was set to gather the queer, spotted, purplish-brown fritillaries, whilst I crammed the leaping little reptiles into our bottle. And so the June afternoon slipped by, until the clang of evening bells warned us it was time to turn homewards. The next morning, when the train which conveyed us back to towns teamed out of the station, the two things I carried away with me as a remembrance of my first commemoration were a lapful of la France roses and the sight of a pair of wistful grey eyes. Frank had got permission to stay in Oxford during a part of the vacation and work,

but his work took a form which would have scarcely met with the entire approval of his tutor, seeing that he was reading for a first in classics. One night, a few days after, as Christina and I were dressing for an evening party, I was handed a letter in a strange handwriting. It contained a poem, and the poem was about myself. After Tony's telegrams and Hanbury Price's postcards, it seemed idyllic to have a charming, clever young man writing poems about, me.

I waved the missive triumphantly under Christina's nose and made myself, as she remarked, odious for the rest of the evening. He says I am like the morning star shining above the mist of a murky city, and that the birds sing sweeter at my footfall and skim like hope across life's. Life's fiddlestick, said Christina, pass those hot tongs. How can you encourage boys to write you such rubbish I can't conceive? And we're an hour late as it is. "'Get on your cloak, Peggy, and for heaven's sake "'throw that dribble into the fire.' "'But I naturally did nothing of the kind,

"'and when Frank appeared at our house a week later, "'somewhat sad of me in and looking rather thin, "'I did my best to cheer him up, "'though we neither of us said a word about the poem. "'He stayed until it was time to catch the last train to Oxford, "'and after that he was always appearing at unexpected moments. "'He used to write me odd little abrupt notes "'asking if I cared to see him.

"'What could I say? It is awkward to tell people that you don't wish to see them. Besides, besides, I did want to. It was only when it came to the stern realities of life that I took Christina's point of view and saw what an impossible thing it was. I remember so well the day it was finally decided, a cold, drizzling November afternoon. He had rushed up from the country where he was living now that he had left Oxford

and had been shown into the long, amber and white drawing-room, where they had forgotten to light a fire so that the cold winter twilight wrapped us round as we sat. Frank had taken a first, and there was some idea of his getting a fellowship. But he did not wish to stop in Oxford or indeed in England. The imperial destinies of the English race was one of his hobbies, and he asked me to give up London and go to northwestern Canada where he wanted to start a new community.

visions of Margaret Fuller and the Blythe-Dale romance of Lawrence Oliphant and his self-sacrificing bride were evoked to tempt me. But I knew. I still had sense enough to know that it was not for me. The dreary November day had closed in before Frank rose to go. And long after he had gone, I sat on in the cold, dark room. One by one the lamps twinkled out all up the street, and a dreary piano organ came and played some threadbare airs from a

comic opera. Christina was very nice to me when she found me sitting alone in the cold and the dark, for I think she knew I had been crying. Frank Harding has always refused to see me since that day. He writes sometimes. The last time I heard from him he was in South Africa, and I gathered from his letter that he considered the amalgamation by marriage of the Boer race the duty of all English settlers in the Transfell.

There are times, times when I am a little tired of the egotism. and puerile frivolity of London young men, tired of their little quarrels and their little admirations for fashionable divinities. When I would give worlds to see Frank stretched in my deck-chair, his grey eyes gazing into futurity and propounding even the most amazing

of his curious social schemes. And he, does he ever think of those old Oxford days, days full of cool green shadows and quick with emotion, over yonder in his home under a torrid sky? Probably not. probably not. There are no fields of Amaranth on this side of the grave, some poet has wisely written. There is no name with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at

last. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Five. He was curiously pretty, incredibly malicious and indisputably smart, with a nice house in Sloan Street where he entertained a great deal, and a little following of young gentlemen who copied his neckties and buttonholes, and whom one sometimes saw giggling together in corners and calling each other by pet names. When one of them wanted to give Val Redmond a birthday present, in that set the young men constantly make each other little presents. He chose a silver vinaigrette, which Val took out with him to dinner all that season. And yet the boy was very far from being.

a fool. If he had lived in less degenerate days and had been obliged to work for his living, he might have made a name for himself. But as it was, he only gave amusing parties, while one was haunted by misgivings if one had to leave his drawing-room early, with one's reputation behind. When he gave dinners and Sunday lunches at his house in Sloan Street, his aunt, Lady Marchmont, presided. To have had only men's parties would not have suited Val. He liked the society of women and particularly of old women. But then his elderly female friends were invariably clever, and some had had, in addition, an almost historical past. Dear Julia Calverly, he would say of the Dowager Countess, he had the most astounding way of

talking of his elderly dames. I love that woman. It is as good as reading a scandalous memoir for servile to talk to her. Julia is very faint a siekler, admitted a pasty-looking youth of Oh, my dear! End of the last century you mean, smirked Val. One of the most amusing things about Mr. Valentine Redmond was his imperturbable coolness. Though hardly two and twenty he had none of the tremors, the diffidences of youth. I have seen him talk to an archbishop or a foreign potentate with the same ease with which he would tackle an undergraduate or take a young lady down to supper. Not that you would ever have caught Val Redmond wasting his assidulous,

sweetness on a young girl. Women under 30 seldom went to his house. One of his least pleasing characteristics was a tendency to flout and pout. He was constantly having little quarrels with his intimate friends. His intimate friendships lasted, on average, exactly six weeks. In other houses where they talk scandal, it is usually about acquaintances, but in Val's drawing room, you generally heard his bosom friends deprived of their reputations. This is a trait which means.

makes society feel uneasy, and to it one may perhaps attribute the brief duration of Val's friendships. Hours, for instance, though it was never prefer it, lasted but a brief two months. The Duchess of Birmingham brought him to our house. She was going to have her portrait painted, and Val was brought along to help to decide on her costume. He knew a great deal about clothes. His taste was charming, his house as pretty as a house need be. Her grace was a stout little person from Philadelphia who was at vast pains to acquire an English manner. Her chief desire, as far as I could make out, was to be painted in a coronet. But Mr. Redmond, with his head on one side and his eyes half shut, tabooed the idea of a diadem.

He was rather in favor of sables, of dark velvets, of heavy brocades. Father, I remember, was furious when he had gone. Does the young puppy think he knows more about it than I do? Confound his impudence. Why, I have been painting portraits for 20 years. And yet, after all, it was Valentine's costume which was chosen, and the Duchess brought him again more than once to see the picture as it progressed. Father always liked to have me in the studio when he was painting,

so that every time he appeared we made a little more of each other's acquaintance. I think I was rather rude to him than otherwise, but he was the sort of person who disliked Gush in women. Gushing was too much the prerogative of his boys, who usually by the by, were heard addressing each other as, My dear. Sitting on the Oaken staircase of the studio,

talking to Val while the Duchess's portrait went on below, I learned a number of surprising things about London society. He told me of all the houses where a young man might permit himself to be seen, where it would be to his advantage to do so, and where it would be fatal, absolutely fatal for him to appear. I had the imprudence to lunch with the Paterson-Taylor's, those new people in Prince's Gate. and though of course a lunch doesn't count the same as a dinner i assure you it was weeks before i heard the last of it a young man can't be too careful where he goes val confided to me one day with a rueful air

He had found me filling the bowls and vases with roses and had insisted on being allowed to help. It was one of his talents, that of arranging flowers. He was sitting on the hall table, swinging his feet and holding his head on one side as he twitched an amethyst-colored orchid in front of the light. There is the question of dancing, too. Oh, not that! screamed Mr. Redman in his rather shrill voice as he plucked a huge poppy out of my hand. You can't possibly put that in blue and white. Nankine is only for roses. What was I saying?

Oh, yes, about balls. Isn't it absurd of people to expect one to dance everywhere? Some of us were at Mrs. Vandalar's ball the other night, you know the woman I mean, with a quantity of drab daughters. And she actually had the effrontery to seize me by the elbow and ask me why I wasn't dancing the polka. As if anyone ever did anything but sup at the Vandaleurs. and as if she didn't know perfectly well

that one only dances at the house as where one dines. I resisted for a long time, and then she had the shocking taste to remind me that she had seen me leading the cotillion at the duchesses with Lady Susan when she knows that Lady Susan is one of the most amusing persons in London. She is the faintest sieckle old maid.

I shall never forget our first dinner at his house in Sloan Street. It was the oddest party. There was something strange and unusual, not only about the guests, but the very dishes and the flowers. The dining room, painted and decorated like that of a Roman villa, contained nothing but the table and one or two giant palms and pots of old faeons. The tablecloth was nearly covered with a mass of pink rose leaves, with here and there a spray of roses thrown carelessly on to this pink carpet. A huge lamp of oriental workmanship hung by gold chains lighted up the mass of rose color, and there were none of the usual friparies of a lady's table.

But perhaps what struck one most on glancing round the room was the fact that all the men were boys, though they appeared prematurely old, and that all the ladies were elderly, though they, to be sure, looked unnaturally young. The glories of the past simpered the pale, clean-shaven youth who had taken me in, surveying the ladies with unabashed effrontery.

It reminds me of the ruins of the Acropolis, don't you know? My neighbor got very confidential as the dinner progressed. He gazed at me critically with tired eyes under lids which drooped a little at the corners. Do you know our host well? No. The pity he's so shockingly malicious. Gives charming dinners, as far as the people go, but I don't think much of his cook, do you? Oh, no, I've only known him a fortnight.

He insisted on being introduced to me at the Vandalur's ball, and I thought as he is a great friend of one of my dearest friends, Tommy Singleton, you know, that he would be sure to be nice, and I really do think he's charming. He would take no denial. I've dined here already three times. We go everywhere together. Do you see that weird old person opposite? She says quite two deliciously amusing things. She is a great friend of the Prince of Wales's. Tommy Singleton seems in great form tonight. He is so very charming. I must in introduce you to him, though I'm afraid, my dear Miss Winman, that you won't get on very well. Tommy is so dreadfully frightened of debutantes.

Don't you think, dear Lady Rugemo's new toupee is quite delicious? I do. But then, I adore the meretricious and the artificial. That is Miss Van Hoyt, the American heiress. She always wears that miniature of an old gentleman with a hooked nose and powdered hair. She says it's her grandfather. But Tommy Singleton declares, and he had it from the Duchess, that Miss Van Hoyt's grandfather kept a small cheese-monger shop in Ninth Avenue. How quite too weird a lady Susan looks! But then she always has her gowns made from remnants bought at the summer sales.

She must have said something dreadful improper to Val. He is laughing so. Look, he has got quite pink. I wonder what it is. I shall ask her directly. She loves to have the whole table listen to her. stories, though really her stories are D'un Red. Lady Susan, you know, is not afraid of

Le Moe Chishok. And of a truth, the ladies at Mr. Redmond's dinner table denied themselves nothing in the way of speech. Nor when the cigarettes were handed round did they show the usual feminine reluctance to light up. Though this may have been a protest on their part against the effeminacy of the age, for it was a remarkable fact at Mr. Valentine Redmond's parties that, though the elderly

ladies invariably smoked, none of the young gentleman indulged in nicotine. When the men rejoined us in the drawing-room, I found myself, to my surprise, the center of a small group of attentive youth. One sat on a footstool at my feet, another hung over the back of the sofa, while a third reclined among the cushions at my elbow. And they all asked if they might come and call. Afterwards I heard that Mr. Redmond had passed the word that I was charming, a dictum which they always accepted without questioning.

Val and his friends invariably worshipped in a little crowd. After that night, Mr. Valentine Redmond was pleased to indulge in one of his wild enthusiasms. He brought all his boys to see me one by one, and insisted that they should admire me as much as he did, which was as tiresome for them, poor things, as for me. My photograph framed in golden turquoises was for exactly five weeks a conspicuous. object on his drawing-room table, after which for a fortnight it stood on a cupboard in a dark corner, and, finally, I hear, disappeared altogether, to the limbo with the rest of his departed

enthusiasm's languish. But I am anticipating the catastrophe. For six weeks at least, Val and I saw a good deal of each other. At one of our big parties, Mr. Redmond and some of his young friends made quite a little sensation when they appeared. They were all clean-shaven, and all had tired eyes, exaggerated buttonholes, and shoes of phenomenal luminosity. Gracious heavens, whispered Christina when she saw them all file in, they always went about in cab-fulls. What are they? Where did you find them? And what's to be done with them now they're here? But Valentine Redmond and his friends never wanted amusing. They all had a passion for being introduced to other young men of their own age, and failing that they gathered

together in corners and smirked over their own little jokes. The chief amusement of these boys I soon found out was to go to music halls. They spoke of Miss Bessie Bellwood with bated breath, and would hear of no other comedians than Mr. Arthur Roberts and Mr. Albert Chevalier. They had a positive infatuation for acrobats for those stout, bespangled gentlemen who tie themselves into knots and balance themselves on each other's heads, with a fixed smile to the accompaniment of a spirited waltz tune. It was Val Redmond's delight

to get two or three smart women to dinner with a corresponding number of boys and then to take the party on to the empire or to the pavilion. Why do you like tumblers and topical songs so much? I asked Val one day when I had refused for the fourth time, a pleading invitation to make one of a party to the tivoli.

He shrugged his shoulders and looked rather annoyed. Culture is such a bore, he said. We have been to son canaille some canaille Kekafo. This London ideal lasted, I think, nearly two months, and then, as London ideals will, it came to a painless death.

Its end was hastened by gossips, and it was killed with a mo. Val Redmond's ambition was to start a salon street, but he has only succeeded so far in running a restaurant. Christina had said on one of her unamiable days. Someone, of course, told Val.

The rupture left no sense of law. though good-looking clever and amusing Val Redmond's personality somehow left one cold it was an essentially thin nature had I ever had occasion to appeal to his help his sympathy I fancy I should have had a charming gushing little note to say that he was going out of town one had an uneasy feeling that his devotion was only meant for dinner parties his little compliments were like his bonbons the accompaniments of the box he offered you at the play once a year or so we see still go and dine with Val. The swinging lamp, the spreading palms, the wealth of hot-house flowers are always there, but it is the rarest thing to find the same face. Our host renews his friends as often as the bouquets in his buttonhole. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 6. The Provincial Young Men

has never possessed any attractions for me, and it is certain that if I had not gone up north to stay with Daisy Driesdale, I should never have known so well such a striking specimen of the type as Dr. Stiles. He was not a bad fellow, but he was naively pleased with himself and his belongings. Your provincial indeed is rarely modest. In the limited circle of Countrytown Society, a suitable young man is pursued with too much pertinacity and ardor to have any doubts in his own mind as to his personal desirability and manifold charms. Dr. Stiles was a stoutish person of 32, with nondescript features and a slow, portentous manner, along with a large and increasing practice in the suburb of Northa, where his

medical skill was in constant request among the spinsters and widows of that somewhat damp and chilly neighborhood. So highly esteemed were his services in the sick room that these ladies would send for him at all hours of the day or night, until the good doctor in self-defense took to sending his red-haired assistant to some of his more flagrantly imaginary invalids. Daisy Drydale's husband was a manufacturer in Mudchester, and, like other manufacturers, he lived as far away from the factory chimneys of that thriving city as possible. So his brand-new red-brick mansion lay on the other side of the suburb of Northaw,

and the Society of Northaw supplied nearly all Mrs. Driesdale's intellectual recreation. Poor Daisy! How she missed London! And what, as she plaintively asked, was the use of her giving little dinners seeing the component elements of which her parties were to be hence forward composed. Still, she was not to be baffled, and Mrs. Driesdale constantly entertained.

She kept open house, too, and was delighted to see people drop in of an evening. The very night I arrived, by some chance, Dr. Stiles came in about nine o'clock. They were playing whist at one end of the long drawing-room, and I was set down. to entertain the doctor at the other. I shall not easily forget that night.

Accustomed to the manifestly insincere gushings of London young men, I was amused at the naive manner in which this country Esculapius comported himself. For a long time we talked of the last exhibition at Burlington House, for he remembered father's pictures and was much impressed, apparently, by the fact that he was talking to an academician's daughter. The provinces are still impressed by the Royal Academy. me. They played more than one rubber of wist that night, but Dr. Stiles remained until the end. Before he left, he had offered to lend me a horse, proposed that he should drive me to a

ruin ten miles off, and expressed a wish that I should know his three sisters. The drive to the ruin had assumed the proportions of a picnic before three days were over. Life, as someone has justly observed, would be tolerable if it were not for its pleasures, and, possibly our English summers would be less dreary to look back upon, were it not for the inevitable picnic. The day declared itself gray and chilly, with watery-looking clouds

hanging despondingly overhead. But as it was not actually raining, we, of course, felt obliged to start. The doctor drove Mrs. Drysdale and me, and as he had to stop and see several patients on his way out of Northaw, we were three-quarters of an hour late when we arrived on the festive scene.

We found our friends reclining on rugs and cushions in a damp field where there was an unmistakable odor of manure. We found all of our friends. also that they were already more than half through the meal, for as they justly observed, the cold had made them uncommonly hungry, though the quantity of well-picked bones and empty bottles sufficiently proclaimed the fact. But the mention of empty bottles suggests an air of hilarity which did not belong to this particular feast. A number of total abstainers were of the party,

and these had brought their own supply of perry, lemonade, and mineral waters, and now sat apart round one tablecloth, surveying with somewhat unsheap-like glances, the good-esought. The goats who were imbibing shandy gaff and claret. This attitude on the part of non-alcoholic Northa not being conducive to sociability, the party as a whole cannot be said to have been, as the French say, of a mad gaiety. The doctor did his best, but he had not the light social touch. If he offered you the salad it was with a portentous air. Or did he spread you a cushion, he never dropped his professional manner?

Several untoward accidents marred what was left of the day. A young lady had hysterics at the back of the ruin, and the doctor, who was fetched just when he was showing me the view from the topmost turret, muttered something distinctly ungalant about his prospective patient as he hurried off. A drizzle began just as the tea was laid, and the rain fell in dismal earnest as we drove home to Northaw. The next time I saw our friend Dr. Stiles, my head was tied up in a flannel shawl, and my throat was so swollen that I could hardly speak. The doctor had been called in professionally. The Northaw picnic had been too much for a Londoner uninjured to the climate, and I was down with a malignant sore throat. The doctor came every day, and once he came twice to work a patent inhaler

and paint my throat with some mysterious compound. He constantly changed the treatment. It was as if he never could do enough. He even used to bring me flowers, and whoever heard of a doctor taking his patient flowers. Daisy was convulsed with amusement. She said that when she was ill, she sometimes used to have to send for Dr. Stiles

two or three times before he appeared. He was so busy. At the end of a week, I was better, and in ten days I was quite well. I really felt very grateful, for I knew that the doctor had saved me by his constant care from a dangerous illness. I wonder if he took my gratitude for...

something else? Anyway, as I told Christina when she's told me for the whole affair, it was not my fault. The thing came quickly to a crisis. We were all invited to spend an evening at the doctor's house. In the north they have a mysterious meal called High Tea, which is apparently a source of no little comfort and even of self-righteousness. It enables the habitual partakers thereof

to allude witheringly to the late dinner indulged in by inhabitants of the South, and so if you are invited out in Northa, be sure you will be regaled on tea and tea and tea. cold chicken, fearful mixture, on hotcakes, jam, marmalade, and current buns. To this evening meal, then, we were bidden by Dr. Stiles. He lived alone with his sisters who were curiously like him. They were all stoutish, with nondescript features, and had solemn and somewhat stolid manners. To see all four of them together inclined one to indecent mirth,

it was impossible to be more worthy, more dull, and more self-satisfied. They sat in a circle in the long drawing-room on rather uncomfortable chairs. All three of the Mrs. Stiles took great interest in church matters, or at least in the curate who was unmarried, and whom they consulted very often on the subject of soup tickets and flannel petticoats. The curate and a boy of about nineteen years of age with a shrill voice were the other men of the party. Miss Stiles, the eldest of the three Miss Stiles,

was a capital housekeeper. Everything went like clockwork in the dark. doctor's roomy house. The early dinner was served to a minute. Two o'clock was the hour. If the doctor were out, the meal proceeded with unfailing punctuality, a slice of mutton being kept hot in the oven for the master of the house. On the long, bare, lavender-colored walls of the drawing-room hung several watercolors by Miss Louisa. Indeed, the Mrs. Stiles were considered to have a pretty taste for art. They painted everything within reach with sprawling red roses or startling white daisies,

the doctor being of opinion that his sister's artistic talent was of the first order. Miss Ada, too, was musical and sang songs by Pansoudi and Milton Wellings. The doctor liked Miss Ada's vocal efforts.

Miss Emily was literary. At least she assiduously read Miss Edna Lyle and Mr. Ryder Haggard, and of these authors we discoursed solemnly until tea was announced. The table groaned with good things. with buttered toast, with salad, with vague dishes covered with custard, with ham, with quivering blancmange. The curate it transpired had a phenomenal appetite, though he coughed and expostulated when helped to a third serve of pressed beef.

Both he and the shrill-voiced boy had been among the abstaining sheep at our picnic. This evening meal, therefore, washed down by tea and coffee, had obviously no terrors for them. The conversation was not of the kind that dazzles. There were frequent pauses during which Miss Ada made several bald statements about a forthcoming village concert, and the doctor, wishing to show his knowledge of the town, solemnly inquired if I had seen Mr. Irving and Henry VIII. The air was full of ominous portents. The doctor's manner, when he invited me for the second time to partake of cold chicken or pressed upon me with northern hospitality, the current cake, was full of a certain protecting pride, while a humbly conquering expression was in his eyes,

when they rested upon me. It was with Intention, as the French say, that he showed me the photograph album full of ants and cousins after tea. The good doctor looked quite sentimental when later on Miss Ada warbled a romance with Walt's accompaniment entitled The Love That Will Never Fade.

I began to feel restless. More than once did I cross the room and gauge either of the Mrs. Stiles in feverish conversation, I always ended by finding the doctor at my elbow. At last, I resigned myself to my fate and sat down to talk to him. I imagined that the sanitary state of the suburb of Northa would be a safe subject, and one unlikely to lead to a declaration of a tender nature, but in this it appeared,

I was mistaken. We got on to the subject of fevers, and, to convince me on a certain point, the doctor suggested a reference to one of the medical books in his surgery. Once inside the little room, which lay just across the passage, Dr. Stiles shut the door, and advanced towards me with that particular expression which is so intolerable in a man one doesn't care for. I put on my most indifferent manner and inspected with much interest the rows of medical books in their glass case. So kind of you, I said hurriedly to fill up the dreadful paws, to take so much trouble. Most doctors only laugh at you if one wants to know any real fact.

About your dreadful trade, I added with flippancy seeing that the man was not listening to a word I was saying, but was gazing at me as an amiable snake might be said to regard a sparrow. Trouble, he said at last. How can anything be a trouble that is done for you? I wish you would let me tell you how much I, how much I. A sharp rap at the door interrupted this speech. A servant came in. Please, sir, Mr. Brown is very bad, and Mrs. Brown says, Will you come at once, and bring some of the drops, and she hopes you won't belong? A three-mile drive, said Dr. Stiles with a sigh, and I shall not see you again tonight. He took my hand and held it fast. I will bring the book tomorrow morning.

Shall I have a chance of seeing you alone? Try to be alone when I come, and wrenching my hand violently the doctor disappeared. Daisy, I said hurriedly in the carriage going home. I'm sorry to say, dear, I shall have to go home by the ten-fifteen tomorrow. "'I—I had a telegram just before we came out.' "'You had a fiddle-stick. "'What nonsense, Peggy. "'Why, you came to stay a month and you've hardly been twelve days.'

"'Twelve days? Good heavens. Why, how has he—' "'Oh, it's that, is it? And so you don't like him? "'Well, I think you're silly. You might do much worse. "'How much better to settle down with someone like that than with one of your flippity London young men?' He's sensible, clever, a good fellow, well-off, and very fond of you. The ten-fifteen, please, Daisy. And sure enough, by the ten-fifteen I went. As the Yorkshire Fields flew behind me on my rapid journey back to London,

the whole thing seemed like some nightmare from which I had just awoke. Great heavens! From what had I not escaped? A lifetime of high tea, suburban gossip and provincial substance. self-sufficiency, of rose-bedecked door panels, the novels of Mr. Ryder Haggard, and the love that will never fade. I am very fond of Mrs. Driesdale, but it will be a long time before I again trust myself to the seductions of that suburb of Manchester. End of Chapter 6th. Chapter 7 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth-Dixon. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

seven it was not very tragic the first time i saw him and the last time i saw him i laughed and the interval was not unamusing quite suddenly he had become the fashion some great lady in london i forget who had heard claude carson recite one of his own love-songs at a concert got up for a charity and she had invited him to her house where he had met other women of fashion and between themselves in their little set they had determined to make him the mode. It was at one of the Duchess of Birmingham's nicest parties, one of her small musical evenings that we first saw him. I had been away from town a month or two and was out of touch with London things, so that when someone said excitedly to me in the supper room, Oh, come upstairs, Claude Carson is going to recite, and I saw all the women trailing out of the room at once. I turned to the nearest young man to ask what it all meant. Oh, some cad with long hair who rolls his eyes about and recites erotic poems. Meet him at every blessed place you go to was the answer, as my informant helped himself to plover's eggs and reach for a fresh bottle of champagne.

Upstairs, however, in the music room there was a flutter of excitement. A royal duchess was present, an event, coupled with the fact that this new artist was going to perform, favoring that kind of electric buzz in the air which is so precious to the ears of an anxious hostess. Round the grand piano was a line of pretty women, all with their eyes turned towards the seated figure at the music-stool. There was perfect silence as Mr. Claude Carson rippled a few chords over the keys. I peeped over the shoulders of two or three people in front of me and saw a white face framed in long, blonde hair which fell in one straight lock across the forehead. The eyes which were fixed on the cornice of the ceiling were dark grey in color and full of

what young ladies call, soul. The nose was thin and straight, the lips full. and beautifully curved, the jaw rather square and pathetically thin. It was a face out of a Byrne Jones picture. Then the long, white hands moved rhythmically over the piano, and Claude Carson, sweeping an ineffably weary glance along the line of pretty faces bent towards him, finally fixed his gaze on the Royal Duchess, and began to recite, speaking his words in a rather monotonous tone to an accompaniment of ripples and chords. Ah, he is going to do that charming thing from his roses of passion, the book which he is just going to publish, somebody whispered excitedly.

I like him best when he recites his own poems. First, Mr. Claude Carson told us how he had met a young person in the twilight's mellow time and how the daisies had kissed her feet, but how she, swerving beneath his glances, had flitted through the network fine of buds which blow in Hawthorne's glow. But eventually it appeared the lady had not proved so. for in the second verse Mr. Carson very justly remarked, But if you linger in that place beneath the hawthorn's interlace, And I may gaze upon your face,

Shall love forgo sweet passions flow. The stars alone look down on high, The winds alone repeat your sigh. No eyes are lonely trist to cry. They little know, they little know. Fans waved in time to the quaint rhythm, Necks were craned forward, eyes drooped and glisten. There were pensive smiles on curved lips.

It was not very good, but there was something magnetic about the strange performance. Claude Carson effectually filled the stage. While he was reciting, it was impossible to look in any other direction. And if the second twilight break, faint bird notes sweet the morning make, and wondering world now reawake, and life re-flow with love and love and woe. The new day finds us parted sweet, and new worlds open at our feet. Once strange, a stranger shall we meet? We little know, we little know. He finished in a whisper which just filtered through his clenched teeth. An elderly gentleman coughed severely, and a couple of young ones

with faces as unemotional as their glistening shirt-fronts exchanged a swift expressive glance. The Royal Duchess beamed approval and signified that the reciter should be presented to her. The whole performance was a delightful interlude in the decorous solemnity of her exalted existence. I was the only woman in the room who laughed. I suppose it's an acquired taste like caviar or absent, I said to a smart woman near me,

but one has got to get accustomed to it. Why does he play the piano all the time if he's going to recite? The smart lady surveyed me with a wither glance. It's the most charming thing in London, she said. Claude Carson is a delightful person. All heads were turned in the direction of the young poet as he stood talking to the Royal Duchess. His beautiful eyes fixed on her face, while occasionally with a pretty fatigued movement, he raised a white, graceful hand and pushed back the lock of blonde hair

from his forehead. Before the short conversation was over, she had invited him to come and see her. "'It's stupid, hardly decent and almost incomprehensible,' said Christina as we drove home. "'So I shouldn't wonder if he became the rage this season.' "'And sure enough he did. One found him everywhere, one went, and I had grown quite accustomed to the thrilling tones of his languorous voice, the enigmatic look in his deep-set eyes, when one night he asked to be introduced to me. "'Everywhere,' said Mr. Carson as he dropped into a chair at my side. Everywhere I see your face.

But until tonight I did not know who you were, he added softly. His tone, his manner annoyed me. Perhaps you didn't ask, I suggested, though an instant later I was sorry that I should have allowed myself to be flippant with a strange young man, of whom I did not altogether approve. And then he did something which showed that he was clever. He gazed at me in perfect silence for several minutes until the memory of my my flippant words had quite died away. "'Come,' he said at last in his thrilling tones,

"'let me give you some strawberries.' I took his arm and went. "'We had a charming time that night. Claude Carson was less absurd than he looked. Under his little affectations, there was a boyish-frank personality which was really attractive, and when he could forget the fact

that all the women in the room were staring at him, and remember that he was not expected to keep up the character of a modern minnesanger, while he helped you to quails and plover's eggs, he was a nice, simple boy. Afterwards, by the by, I heard that he was at least eight and twenty, but he was one of those fair, clean-shaven individuals who never look as if they had emerged from their teens. "'I want to come and see you,' said Claude Carson that night, holding my hand as we stood under the portico waiting for the carriage. When may I come?'

"'We are at home on Sundays at five.' "'Not then, not in a crowd of people.' he pleaded. I want to see you, alone. Oh, in that case, I answered laughing. Don't come on a Sunday. Come, say on Wednesday, and then you will see Christina. But Christina, when he finally appeared, found him impossible.

She said that his hands were too white and that the shape of his collar was revolting. She did not like his poems. Generally, she did not understand what they meant, and when she did, she said she wished she hadn't. Claude Carson began to come a good deal. He was always dropping in at tea time, and he never failed to look reproachful

if he found me pouring out tea for Mr. Mandel, Val Redmond, or Tony Lambert. He would sit in a low chair, leaning back, and regarding me with half-closed eyes, a habit which Christina declared was insufferable. Indeed, she generally remembered she had letters to write when Mr. Carson called. I have come to offer you what I prize most in the world,

he said one day when we were alone. But I never take things, anything but flowers. I mean, from people, I objected hastily. Ah, but you will. You must, except this. I dedicate to you my roses of passion, the first-born of my brain. Dear child, they are yours. He handed me a bit of paper on which was written.

To M.W. These, my first trembling, chords on the instrument of life, I dedicate to you. Perfect soul framed in your strange subtly sweet beauty, I worship you from without, with never a thought of earthly gurdon. Fools only wish to pluck the star from the heavens, the lily from its stem. I leave my star in the blue vault, my lily in its garden. London, February, 1890 blank. Oh, I said, how nice! Only you must. Only you must. mustn't put to M.W. You had better put three stars. I shall know who you mean.

We sat and talked for a long time in the twilight. It was the end of February, and the late afternoon was tinged with the pale, wondering light of an early English spring. The trees outside were swelling with purple buds, and through the black branches there was the gleam of a tender, rosy sunset. It was the time of confidences, and the kind of day one says all sorts of things one doesn't mean in a soft, regretful voice, just because they sound well and seem to fit into the emotional hour. Claude Carson knelt on the window seat, his blonde hair turned to pale goal against the window pane. You have helped me more than any woman I have ever known, he said at last with a sigh.

Have I? I asked, touched, flattered, and pleased. I was at an age when a girl likes to be called a woman. I'm sure I don't know how. What have I ever done for you?' He gazed at me for a few seconds and then turned abruptly away. "'You have made my life happier,' he said. In another instant he had pressed my hand and was gone. Christina's dry tones called me back to mundane things. "'And so you have had that impossible young man here for hours,' said my sister,

bursting into the room with all the matter-of-fact and common sense which an afternoon out-of-doors brings with it. May I ask if you intend to make a fool of him, too? To make a fool of him? No, I don't think I shall ever be able to do that. And my words, to be sure, came true. A little while after, we were driving one afternoon towards Hammersmith when suddenly the coachman pulled up.

A huge dray had got across the road, and for a few moments we were obliged to wait while a small crowd urged the horses this way and that. We had stopped in a street of small stucco house, whose weedy front gardens were suggestive of anything but rural delights. And then, as we waited, a thin, undersized child of seven ran out of one of the open hall doors, a door which revealed a vision of a perambulator, a shabby oilcloth, and a framed oleograph, and hung staring over the green-painted rails.

How dare you? Come in directly, ermintrude, said a querulous voice, and, for an instant I caught a glimpse of a rather good-looking young woman in a cheap tailor-made gown. I shall tell your father, you are a most disobedient child. A moment later a young man strode down the gravelled path, seized the undersized child in his arms, kissed her, and carried her indoors. Just as he disappeared in the doorway our eyes met. The young man was Claude Carson. So he is married, your modern minisanger, said Christina dryly,

holding her chin up and looking straight in front of her as we drove on. Apparently, I said, shrugging my shoulders and gazing. at the coachman's back. I was not to be outdone in imperturbability by Christina. He has married the landlady's daughter. Poets generally do. But it was considerate of him, she continued with a twinkle in the corner of her eye,

to leave his star in the blue vault, his lily in its garden, seeing that he has already got one lily and a promising bud or two in Khartoum gardens, Hammersmith. And then we both fell back on the cushions and gave way to uncum-ecushersmith. controllable giggles.

I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks. When will you learn sense? sighed Christina. End of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. 8. You are so good and dear,

repeated Julian Clancy for the second time in his well-bred drawling voice. boys, detaining my hand for an instant in the obscurity of his tapestry-hung hall. Mother, who always remembers she has an appointment in Hampstead or West Kensington, just when one is beginning to enjoy oneself, was already at the bottom of the garden path. Mr. Julian Clancy slowly raised the hand he held to his lips. He was perfectly aware that this last century salute was considered irresistible by his women friends.

He was a charming host. All the guests at Mr. Clancy's party seemed on easy terms. The men called each other by their Christian names. The ladies had quaint little nicknames for their friends. An atmosphere of intimate chat hung about the rooms. The women spoke in cooing tones and had interminable confidences to make, while the men laughed softly as they lent forward to listen with an amused air in the veiled lamplight. It was distinctly a house where one enjoyed oneself. Julian Clancy would ask a dozen people, most of them well known, and he would find them when you arrived, chatting with soft, intimate voices in obscure corners, or loitering

as they whispered the latest malicious story in the draped doorways. Not that Julian Clancy himself ever listened to malicious stories. Though he wrote novels of modern society, lived all the year round in London, and was now over forty years of age, it was astonishing how guileless, how optimistic he remained. His vague face and worn smile suggested only the most indefinite emotions, and yet the warmth of his language was extraordinary. Everyone he knew was a dear or a dear person, while the more favoured ones were so perfectly good and sweet. Mr. Clancy would not listen to a word against anyone.

How could people be so horrid as to say that his dear Lady Roosgmont's beautiful red hair was dyed, or that his charming Charlie Deuce ace was not the most exemplary of husbands? People were so unkind. Well off and well connected, he mixed in the best as well as the rapidest sets in London, but what he really worshipped was the celebrity.

It is an error to suppose that all the Leo hunters are of the feminine sex. Julian Clancy always had the last celebrity, and, failing that, the last notoriety, at his parties in St. John's Wood. He adored St. John's Wood. Celebrated artists, actors, dramatists were all to be found within a stone's throw of his door. He could run in and out a famous studio,

and catch distinguished actors for his little suppers on their way home from the theaters. He tolerated a countess, if she happened to be amusing, but a new dancing girl set him raving. He used to ask great ladies to meet the most extraordinary people, and somehow or other they always came. His Sunday dinners, of eight, were most amusing. One never knew if one would sit next to a guardsman, a burlesque actor, or the representative of a foreign power. He knew everybody. and everybody wanted to know him. The Honorable Julian Clancy, second son of Lord Basingstoke,

had a position in society which is not often the lot of younger sons. But then, to be sure, his brother had no children and was already separated from his wife. In all human probability, Julian would one day succeed to the earldom. And yet he, for his part,

was chiefly preoccupied with literary fame. Every other year or so he published, at his own expense, a rather second-rate novel, which, however, had one merit. It was usually in one volume, with fat print and wide margins, so that when he presented it to his friends with charming little enthusiastic phrases written on the first page, they were able to get a good idea what it was about without being at the pains to read it.

About the time his book appeared, he usually gave one of his pleasantest parties, where one saw him with one arm round the neck of some young man who wrote reviews for the penny papers. In former days when he was younger and less gushing, Mr. Julian Clancy had been in the diplomatic service and had wandered in many lands. He never wandered now. As a matter of fact, he never left London.

Every year, when other people were making their autumn plans, he would point to his garden with its pear trees and hollyhocks, its plashing fountain and cooing doves, and ask you plaintively why he should leave it. September, January or June, he would stroll down St. James Street to his, club at five o'clock every year as soon as August came a paragraph went the round of the gossipy papers chronicling the fact that mr. Julian Clancy never left town people

thought it so original and charming he had quite a little notoriety on that account alone but London to be sure was a passion with him the pavement of Piccadilly was to him what the boulevard is to the Parisian he was miserable five miles from Bond Street, and I have known him to rave about the exquisite effects one saw in a London fog. Julian Clancy made a cult of the metropolis. His house, in springtime, buried in a white cloud of pear blossom, in summer shady with spreading chestnut trees and limes, was one of the prettiest things in town. A low, two-storied cottage with queer-shaped rooms built out at odd angles, it was draped,

arranged, and furnished with an artist's hand. His music room, with its polished floor. and oriental walls contained nothing but a grand piano, a huge spreading palm, and a low downy-de-van running round the sides. But through a Kyrene archway you stepped into a drawing-room crowded with knick-knacks, hung with old brocade, and as dainty as the boudoir of some 18th-century beauty. In the dining-room, the prim thin Chippendale furniture was ranged against a pale-colored wall, while the round table, with its fine damask in Georgian silver, and the soft lamplight illuminating a great bowl of flowers,

was somehow suggestive of brilliant talk and dainty fair. But Mr. Clancy was always modest about his possessions. It's so sweet of you to like my things, he would say deprecatingly to some fashionable lady who was going round his room sniffing up ideas. I never care for anything I have. It's so good of you to like my poor little cottage. He came very often to our Sunday evening party,

when about twelve o'clock, one saw his fatigued, expressionless features and his superb shirt-front appear in the studio doorway. He was one of the men, by the by, who looked their best at night, the sharp black and white of man's evening dress giving him a distinction and elegance which he somewhat lacked. At first I did not know why he came so often. Father, to whom he regularly offered up some of his choicest phrases, never liked him, and took no particular pains to conceal the fact. To mother, all young men, especially in the evening are alike. She looks upon them as necessary evils at our parties,

but makes few distinctions between them. Christina was away that season, so there remained only myself. As the years had passed on, I had had experience enough to know that a man who is heir-presumptive to an English earldom is not likely to preoccupy himself with a middle-class damsel of modest dowry.

What brought him then so often to our house? Time, as usual, revealed the secret, and in this wise. July, with its damp garden parties, was upon us. Mr. Julian Clansy's annual outdoor fayette was one of the events of the late summer. He arranged the thing charmingly, and people intrigued for cards to what was sure to be an amusing party. This year it was rumored he was to have the whole of the frivolity chorus girls attired as milkmaids to dance skirt dances on his velvety lawn. so everybody wanted to go.

For some time beforehand, Mr. Clancy was indefatigable in his calls at our house. He talked as much as he ever talked about anything of his own, for he was only enthusiastic about other people in their parties, which were always perfectly charming, or too lovely, of his forthcoming entertainment. "'I do so hope you'll come,' he said. "'I want you all to come. It would be so sweet and good of you all to come. to come to my little party.

Oh, we don't go about in droves, I said laughing. Won't one or two of the family be enough? Of course, I only insist upon you, said Julian, with a shade of his old diplomatic manner. But I should be so proud if your father would come. A light flashed over me. This then was a possible explanation of Mr. Julian Clancy's devotion. He was hunting a celebrity. He wanted my father.

How dense I had been, to be sure. Father was not only a famous and successful Royal Academission, but he was one of the most amusing people in town. The day of the garden party I was all diplomacy and white muslin. Early in the afternoon I captured my distinguished parent and insisted on his accompanying me to St. John's Wood. I was not going to appear without him as a second-rate substitute for a celebrity.

The sleepy suburban road was a... alive with carriages and cabs as we drove up, and at every turn you nodded to some well-known face. The clean-shaven profile and heliotrope necktie of Duncan Clive the actor were seen in a Victoria side by side with Lady Susan's extraordinary hat. Her ladyship had long ago given up chaperones as superfluous. Val Redmond, Tommy Singleton, and the pale-faced boy foamed out of a handsome, all blue buttonholes and light gloves. The Duchess of Birmingham was driving up in the ducal chariot and had brought Miss Van Hoyt. There was no end to the people one knew. Inside the house it was dark and hot and in the Oriental music room you could hardly stand,

for a famous prima donna was lamenting in a piercing soprano voice and an indifferent Italian accent, the absence of her beloved, while a small red-haired cavalry major told a funny story in a high penetrating voice until several people said, hush, and turned around and frowned. In the dining room one saw a vista of backs pushing and struggling over a buffet, and there was an acrid odor of coffee and strawberries as you passed the open door to reach the garden. Outside, the scene was pretty enough. In the green garden the pink and mauve and white dresses of the women made clear patches on the verdure, and smiling, fatigued faces greeted each other from under fantastic hats.

A Viennese band played beneath a huge cedar. The frivolity girls with their crinkled white feralds, frogs and painted cheeks, looking pinker than ever under their starch sunbonnets, stood huddled together in the distance, and nudged each other as they recognized several smart young men who with imperturbable faces were handing water-ices to the season's debutants. Presently, the band struck up a catchy air, and the girls, forming into a line against a background of ivy, flipped their loose skirts and executed a series of swaying movements with fixed mechanical smiles.

The youngest, a thing of seven. with thin pointed knees had the most surprisingly wooden smile of all. She was like a miniature, but exaggerated copy of the showy girls who towered above her. There was a great deal of applause when they had done, and only the smart young men appeared to be but vaguely interested in the performance. Our host, as usual, was charming, but one felt that something distracting was in the air. One saw it in Mr. Julian Glancy's preoccupied face as he gushed a little over us both, making a civil effort when we entered.

Something important was gone inside the house from the glances which our host kept turning towards the open drawing-room windows. What could it be? We were not long left in doubt. Oh, have you heard? cried Val Redmond, detaining us with a delighted giggle.

Nankowski, the Russian, who says he has been to the North Pole, is in there in the drawing-room. He is such a delightful person. They say he is a leper, but I don't believe that, though I dare say you can catch it from the Eskimo. If I were you, I should only look at him through the window, in case it is true, you know. He certainly is a very odd colour. This, then, was the reason of Mr. Clancy's tepid enthusiasm over father's appearance.

Nankowski, the famous Nankowski, was a very great celebrity, the newest of the season, and he was now holding an informal levee in the drawing-room where people were being introduced to him in shoals. Mr. Julian Clancy, it was obvious, had forgotten his ardor for my father in the triumph of securing a lion with a more penetrating roar. Dear, I said twenty minutes later when we had wandered round the garden shaking hands right and left,

I'm afraid this sort of thing bores you. Let's go home and have tea together in the studio. Just you and I. We looked for our host, but he was not visible. As we crossed the hall, however, we saw his back for an instant through the open drying-room door.

He was quite absorbed and did not hear us going out. Mr. Julian Clancy was bending over the new celebrity and we could hear him saying in his slow, well-bred tones. It was so good and lovely of you to come. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of My Flirtations

by Ella Hepworth Dixon. Libervox recording is in the public domain. 9. It was at the Royal Academy at the private view that I first saw Mr. Albert Morris. Outside, the bright spring sunshine bathed picadilly with its unaccustomed warmth, gilding the tiny crinkled leaves in the green park, making blue shadows under the crowded omnibuses, and illuminating the clinking hardness of the horses which passed in a continual procession into the courtyard of Burlington House.

Inside, up the wide staircase with its crimson carpets and its banks of flowers and plants, all London was elbowing its way to the crowded galleries. People who had intrigued successfully for a ticket wore a triumphant satisfied smile. The critics were preparing their most stolid yet important air. Women journalists felt for their pencils and notebooks eagerly demanding the names of overdressed ladies, and the painters, the Royal Academicians and the few famous outsiders who were are invited to the private view, collected in little knots around some much-discussed canvas, or, plucking each other by the sleeve, hurried through the rooms in search of some striking

picture by an unknown brush. But Mr. Morris hurried neither here nor there, for he was a person of importance. He stood in the middle of the big room, casting cursory glances at the pictures on the walls, and shaking hands with a small procession of people who passed incessantly in front of him, with fashionable ladies who stopped to give him several fingers, and then passed on with a well-turned phrase and a non-committing smile, with journalists, judges, actors, and cabinet ministers. We came upon him suddenly, Father and I, and when I had been introduced, he seemed all at once to have a great deal to say. Mr. Albert Morris was about 50 years old and had a humorous eye. He was rather fat and rather red, and I think his hair

and mustache were very carefully dyed. He was absurdly rich. One of the big weekly papers belonged to him, and he owned a good many shares in the opera. Mr. Morris also bought pictures and was invited nearly every year to the Royal Academy banquet. Everything he touched turned to gold. He had the true instinct of his race for money. Albert Morris made fabulous sums out of the most unlikely things, and they say that he was once seen driving through the city in a four-wheel cab piled to the ceiling with Argentine bonds.

He never went farther away from town than Brighton, in order to be. to be always within an hour of the stock exchange. But with all his money and his influence, he was the simplest of men, and had only two strongly developed tastes, a liking for a good story, and a pretty woman. His house in Piccadilly was, it is through, a little over-gorgeous.

But then he had left the furnishing and decorating to a well-known firm who had somewhat overdone the Louis XVIth period. Nobody, however, including the owner, seemed to think there were too many carved gilt legs and florid brocades, and in the celebrated white dining room with its panels by chaplain, Mr. Albert Morris used to give little suppers to royalty. He was a self-made man, and he believed in money. He had bought everything, his position, his influence, his friends, his newspaper,

his house, his pictures, his books, and curios, the love of women and the devotion of his servants. There was only one thing he dreaded, and that was at the third. thing from which his millions could not save him. He was horribly afraid of death. Possible accidents or illnesses were a constant anxiety to Mr. Morris. He was childishly frightened of infectious diseases. He never went to bed without a ladder outside his window in case of fire, and he never sat behind, or on, a strange horse. If his little finger ached, or he caught a cold in the head, he consulted the greatest physicians in London, and he always carried a tiny golden flask containing brandy, for someone had once told him he had a weak heart.

Poor Mr. Morris quaking in the midst of his millions. They found him one morning, but I am anticipating. Though of thoroughly Jewish origin, it was astonishing how British and patriotic was my new friend, Mr. Morris. His newspaper was conservative and highly orthodox, and in time of war scares there was an uncompromising jingoism in its leaders. They were inspired by the pre-interested by the pre-provised. proprietor. The church, the state, the house of lords, who knows if the estimable little man may not

have cherished hopes of a peerage himself, were the things that Mr. Morris believed in. In religion he did not tolerate broad church, nor in politics any dallying with Democrats. But these things, after all, were but a pastime. The opera, especially during the last year or two, was the serious preoccupation of his life. Charming little girl of yours, Winman, I over overheard him whispered a father as we were moving on. Might bring her one night to the opera now. Always the same box, you know. Pit tier number 100. Say Thursday. And without waiting for an answer, for he was evidently accustomed to having his wishes exceeded to, Mr. Morris slipped away and was presently in deep confabulation with the leader of the opposition. On the following

Thursday we found ourselves in Mr. Morris's opera box. It was a brilliant night. All the beauties with all their tiaras on were ranged in dazzling groups round the house. Two famous sisters, one married to a marquis and the other on the way to espouse a German princeling, were dressed exactly alike and exhibited precisely the same pensive smile and the same drooping bouquet. They were, however, to-night entirely alone, filling the large box with their pink sleeves and their radiant beauty. Just above them, Lady Susan received a procession of smart young men all the evening. One after the other, the smart young men were convulsed with laughter. You could see their stolid faces getting pink and crinkled as they bent forward to catch

what the lady said. In the next box, a well-got-up mother and a pretty, badly-dressed girl shared the same cavalier between them. It was impossible to tell which he admired the least. An elderly lady in pale blue satin and black pearls exhibited a young and sheepish-looking husband. Mr. Valentine Redmond was supposed to be occupying a stall, but his little smirk and his huge white buttonhole appeared in every box on the grand tier that night. A number of cultured people in the stalls had open books of the score on their knees and never raised their heads to the stage all the evening. They were playing Tristan and his old. Mr. Albert Morris swept with his glasses the crimson horseshoe on which the white shoulders and clear dresses of the women made spots and dots of light and settled himself in his chair with a small grunt of approval. He felt in a way responsible for that brilliant house. He was one of the people who had revived the Moribund Opera and had made it once more the most fashionable lounge in London.

True, he distrusted Wagner and all his works, but he knew there was money in him for a season. He was more proud of his sway behind the scenes than of any other influence he possessed. He prided himself on discovering budding patties and melba's, on unearthing unknown tenors, and discovering veritones of genius. The potains of the green room, the little quarrels behind the scenes, were I verily believe the joy of his existence. He had always a good story to tell about the stars of the company. To spring a new prima donna on the town was the height of his ambition.

One liked Mr. Albert Morris at once. He was immensely comic and had a slow, fat, drawling voice which made his stories irresistible. He was also delightfully candid. Like all the men of his race, he was easily touched by music, and when the famous soprano in white satin with her hair down her back gave forth an operatic lament, I noticed a large tear coursing its way down Mr. Albert Morris's rubicund cheek

and immaculate shirt front. "'Ah, these things make me feel, Miss Windman,' he whispered. "'But then you see, I'm a wicked old sinner. It's only you charming young ladies who are so hard.' It was impossible not to laugh, especially when Mr. Morris put on a gold-faced knee, and holding the book of words a long way off, tried to find out what the story was. "'What's it all about now? Don't understand, German. Oh, here we are.'

act one they tremble and convulsively put their hands to their hearts then again press them to their foreheads their eyes meet anew sink in confusion and once more fasten on each other with looks of increasing passion hum isold sinking on his breast faithlessly fondest tristan pressing her to him with fire deathlessly dearest ah very unfortunate now as she's going to marry the other johnny never have any luck these poor little heroines beautiful high see that she's in great form to-night but later on mr morris was again bewildered by the language of the libretto which he insisted on reading aloud oh highest holest fairest fiercest brimming jest bliss priceless priceless priceless purest bliss priceless purest Fearless, fixed and fearless, blind and breathless. Now I call that exaggerated, don't you know? Did you ever talk to Mrs. Winman like that now, Winman? Nobody ever says that sort of thing to me.

But in spite of Mr. Morris's objections to the Vagnarion methods, our evening at the opera ended amiably all around. Before we separated that night, he had given father a commission for a big canvas. Samson and Delilah was to be the subject of the picture, for Mr. Morris had a taste for the good old themes. And yet, when the picture was half finished, he began to see that it was rather out of date for a modern house. Should you like to put Miss Peggy in now? said Mr. Morris one day as we all three sat criticizing the huge canvas. Nort suitable for Delilah, eh? It was one of his peculiarities that he pronounced naught and got like Nort and Gort.

want a more robust model nort at all just the sort of little girl like miss peggy but father was inexorable i had sat to him as a beccante as a village maiden and as a nun but for delilah he would have none of me Mr. Morris was obviously disappointed. He used to be always dropping in to see how Samson and Delilah was getting on, and he nod and frequently stayed to lunch. Charmin. Hashed mutton, just what I like. Anything does for me? Gord a passion for baked potatoes, dear, declared Mr. Morris who feasted like Lucullus at home. It was another of his peculiarities by the by that he usually addressed the whole female sex as dear.

Mr. Morris chaffed everybody, from the editor of his paper to the cabman who drove him to the city. He even chaffed Christina. On one celebrated occasion when Christina had turned vegetarian, she sat eating nothing but watercress, lettuce and endive all through lunch. My heavens, said Mr. Morris at last, adjusting his eyeglass, and regarding Christina placidly munching a third plate of raw green stuff, is this a beautiful woman or a ruminate an animal from that day forward christina ate fish meat and fowl like the rest of the family samson and delilah was finished at last and to celebrate the hanging of the picture there was to be a little supper in the white dining-room in piccadilly at which a royal personage was expected to be present but mr morris was not to eat his supper with royalty in piccadilly that night On the morning of the party, a foggy November day, Mr. Morris's valet drove up to our door in a handsome. His white, twitching face told us the worst. Albert Morris was dead. And so, after all,

his millions had not been able to save him from what he dreaded, a sudden and a comparatively early death. The servant's scared face was painful to see. He had been genuinely attached to Mr. Morris, and he had entered his room that morning with tea and letters. to find the electric light still burning, and the figure of his master propped up in bed with a book in the hand that had been cold for many hours. It was a French book, the valet said.

Far like la marre, he thought the name was. Albert Morris had drawn his last breath while reading his favorite author. And that was the end. One had a choky feeling in the throat when one thought of it. Of course, in stories and plays, it is only the death of the young

the handsome and the virtuous which is meant to rouse our deepest pity. Yet in real life it is often the figure of an Albert Morris, stout, genial, worldly, rolling in wealth, and terrified at death, which most readily claims our tears. Of the earth earthy, we can only picture them in their clubs or at our dinner tables. In the grand drama of death it seems impossible that this should ever take apart. They, the heroes of half a dozen farces, the authors of half a hundred moh

End of chapter nine Chapter 10 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon This Libervox recording is in the public domain Ten I'm surprised now that you English ladies don't come often or on our side I should surmise that young ladies have a better time in America than anywhere else on this earth The deference paid to woman in the United States

is one of the most remarkable of our national characteristics. I tell you, you find it in every relation of life. There's this divorce act now. A man, in America, will allow his wife to get a divorce from him if they find that they can't agree. He would not think of letting his wife take the blame. I should say now that that sort of thing was unheard of in this country. Your men, now, I should judge, would not be apt to take the blame on themselves.

I have been much strut. though, with the splendid physical appearance of your young men. Why, in Rotten Row, I have seen more remarkable-looking men in one morning's walk than I should be apt to see in a week on Fifth Avenue or Broadway. Your tailors now, they are one of the most remarkable of your institutions, if one may say so. You English ladies, too, are just perfectly lovely. Your high-bred repose is perfectly fascinating, and you are, I should judge, more affectionate than American woman?

I should say now that you had more more. heart? The trouble is that our society girls don't begin to have any. Why, there was an English nobleman, Sir John Lacklands, in New York last winter. That man was over 72 years of age. Well, he is about to be married to one of the youngest buds of this season, the daughter of one of our most prominent railroad kings. Why, the night before I sailed from New York, I went to see a girl in Madison Avenue, and there was a handsome young fellow of three and twenty who had been calling every evening at that house for some weeks. When he left, I thought I should congratulate her on her engagement.

Why, said she, What queer old-fashioned ideas do you do have? Well, I don't know but what I'm thinking of marrying, but I guess it's his grandfather, the millionaire, who's to be the happy man. Christina and I gasped, as Mr. Alicia Van Schuyler at last paused, though apparently more to point his story than to take breath. In appearance he was tall, but not so much. broad-shouldered as an English man of his height would have been. He had a dapper little pointed

beard and a mustache and keen, intelligent eyes. His coat was made by a tailor in Saville Row. We had never seen an American gentleman. Transatlantic women we had met by the score, admired their gowns, laughed at their stories, and secretly envied their unfailing vivacity. But none of the New Yorkers and Philadelphians that we had known in London had ever appeared to have, or seemed to have wasted a thought on any male belonging. Therefore, when Mr. Alicia Van Schuyler presented himself with a letter of introduction from her grace of Birmingham, who had known him in her early days in America, it was with a feeling of keen curiosity that we undertook to show him the studio and its contents.

Our studio is one of the show ones of London, and if Mr. Van Schuyler's face fell a little when confronted with Papa's portraits, he was lavish in his admiration of the beautiful room. We don't begin to have anything like this in New York. He said giving a comprehensive look round. Our artists either can't afford to furnish the studio. Nobody buys American pictures on our side, or else they sort of overdo the thing. Too much tapestry, too many suits of mail,

too many mandolins and too many ivory crucifixes. There was a man who studied in Paris and thought he'd go home and do the Society Act as well as paint portraits of the 400. Well, that man was as much fun as a goat. He just got as thin as a romewerex. rail and as bald as a coot trying to work the society racket. I tell you, he had a rocky time.

He took a huge studio in one of the most fashionable parts of New York, furnished it perfectly elegantly, and began by painting one of our society bells, for nothing. Then he used to lend his studio to Polish pianists and Spanish dancing girls, just to get the 400 inside his house. And they used to crowd right in and drink his tea and his punch, and go right away and get their portraits painted by a third. third-rate Frenchmen who had fixed up an atelier next door. Why, I tell you that Frenchman!

And here Mr. Van Schuyler was fairly launched on another stream of talks, which lasted, without intermission, until he rose rather abruptly to go. First, he made us a low bow, a bow so deep that I have only seen it equaled by that of a Russian attach, and then he reconsidered the question and shook hands with us one after the other, very high up in the air. He was evidently under the impression that this was the latest mode of salutation. When the heavy tapestry curtains had finally swung back behind him, Christina called my attention to the fact that both together,

we had only been allowed to put in three sentences, so entirely had our transatlantic guest monopolized the conversation. I thought they always said that American women did all the talking, said Christina dryly. But this young man seems to have a fancy for monologues. I timed one of his stories, that about General Horace Porter and— What's the other man's name? Chauncey DePue?

And it lasted exactly 17 minutes by the clock. Never mind that, I retorted. This American is going to be amusing. And in truth he turned out to be charming. After a while, when he took to coming pretty often, even Christina did not mind the length of Mr. Van Schuyler's anecdotes. He had, as I took occasion to point out to Christina more than once, that desirable thing in man or a woman, a twinkling eye,

and he had also a pretty taste in flowers and bonbonaires, and a perfect mania for giving theatre parties with dainty little suppers afterwards. And later on, when we knew him better, he had an inexhaustible fund of excellent if slightly irreverent stories. He had his little peculiarities to be sure. He was never tired of asking questions about the royal family and the House of Lords, and once, one night when we were all done, dining with him at the Savoy, he made us write out a list of English duchesses to see how many

there were. "'But I don't know any,' I objected, except the Duchess of Birmingham and she's an American. "'Mercy, we don't count her,' said Mr. Alicia van Schuyler. He was fond of asking tiresome questions, too, about the Perth places of famous people in London. And he never looked at me I am convinced without seeing me against a fancy background of the Tower, Windsor Castle, and Stratford on Ivan. I sometimes feel that he expected me to live up to a famous past. But Mr. Van Schuyler's stay in London was not without its distractions. He wanted to know everybody and everybody seemed pleased to know him. He wished all his friends to have a good time

at his expense. He was generosity itself. One could not express the vaguest wish without its being immediately carried out. His generosity even took the form of inviting his rivals to dinner, and what astonished me even more, sending one in with them. There was nothing mean or narrow-minded about our new American friend. And yet, though expansive and voluble, we seem to know him no more intimately at the end of three months than at the end of his first call. Was there, under all his gregariousness, a deep-seated reserve? Christina thought that on the whole she preferred people who talked less and who said more. He had, to be sure, an enormous admiration for English women,

especially the sort of young woman who rides to hounds, sculls a boat, and bags her own grouse. He constantly assured us that if we would cross the Herring Pond and spend a winter in New York or Washington, we should at once attain the rank of raging bells, though we as constantly disclaimed all intention of competing with a homegrown article on the other side of the Atlantic. But every day as July Verged on August and everyone was thinking of the Moors

and Homburg and X, Mr. Van Schuyler grew more and more civil. He looked unutterable things. Hardly a day passed without a gorgeous bunch of roses being sent. I began to wonder what life was like in New York if it was all roses and devotion and boxes at the play. My family began to regard me

with unwanted tenderness and consideration, and it was obvious that they have expected Mr. Alicia Van Schuyler might carry me off by the next Ocean Greyhound. Qualms of conscience, an unwanted experience with me, began to assail me, and, more than once, I asked myself whether I liked this young man chiefly for himself or for his dollars, when that little dinner put an unexpected end to my doubts. It was at Hurlingham that the last act of the comedy was played. The polo ground was thick with wide-sleeved, slim-looking women, and with broad-shouldered military men, whose necks were bronzed by Indian sons. Here, one caught the profile

of some country-bred girl with neat fair plates tucked away under a straw hat, and there, a radiant vision of dainty laces and a delicate rose-pink visage half-hidden under a vast parasol. Carefully made-up old men walked mincingly along, hoagling the prettiest faces as they passed, and mentally comparing the beauties of 1892, with those more fascinating young creatures of 30 years ago. It was a mild, gray-skied afternoon of mid-July, and the sound of the Gold Stream Guards Band came softly over the lime-scented air. On the lawn in front of the clubhouse, the white-jacketed waiters ran quickly to and fro with trays of tea and strawberries, and the checkered light of the huge Chinese umbrellas over the tables threw curious little shadows on the faces of the tea-drinkers.

All around pretty women were nodding and smiling at their bachelor friends. Over yonder, the new beauty was obviously being made love to by somebody else's husband, while inside the cool carpetless clubhouse could be seen the profiles of an elderly painted personage in a muslin gown with pink ribbons and of a bored, handsome young man who was endeavoring to make peace with the irate lady. At the next table, two smart citymen were lighting their cigarettes after tea. Mr. Van Schuyler was more than usually confidential that afternoon. He told him, me how he was just perfectly fascinated with London and with London girls, how he should like to live here, with a sigh, and how, if he couldn't do that, he meant to come just all the

time. He had, thanks to us, a perfectly beautiful time. He should never forget it. Somebody had given a dinner after the polo, and now we were sitting on the terrace drinking our coffee, listening to the metallic music of the Hungarian band, and watching the stars appear one by one above the fat, bronze-coloured elms. Mr. Alicia Van Schuyler drew his chair a little closer to mine. I wonder now if you would like tuxedo.

Like most American things, it's on a larger scale than anything you have on this side. Larger or not, I said hastily. I shall never see it. You know I am always seasick. I shall never cross the Atlantic. Well, now, I call that rough on us. I had just made up my mind that when we were married. Married?

Mr. Van Schuyler? Why, yes, I guess. Now and again when he forgot he was in London, Mr. Van Schuyler would let drop an occasional guess. Mamie and I must fix it up soon if we are ever going to. Mamie's a society girl in Buffalo, and although I'm willing she should have a good time as long as ever she wants to,

still, I think three years is long enough for a fellow to be kept waiting. Don't you agree with me, Miss Peggy? For a minute I was too astonished to speak. yes i hasten to say three years is rather a long time but then you've managed haven't you to have a fairly good time yourself well i should smile i imagine mamie would allow that i had better keep my hand in all the time and when we settled down in new york i've been sending cablegrams about a house on fifth avenue all this week i hope you'll come over and make us quite a long visit why you would be just a raging tearing bell I smiled and said I should have to make Mrs. Van Schuyler's acquaintance over here, and so we talked it over, and I preferred my congratulations,

while Mr. Van Schuyler took my hand, and held it very hard as he informed me that he meant to settle down in double harness and be a model husband. Next year he brought his wife to see us. At first sight she revealed herself as a restless, talkative flirtatious little person, who had, like her husband, a passion for having a good time, She had brought a cousin, a young man along, as she explained, so her husband shouldn't have to go around shopping with her. He always got mad when she went shopping.

She expected it was pokey anyhow, going around all the time with your own wife. If he didn't like the young man, she didn't care anyway. He was just perfectly sweet, Mr. Van Schuyler. She always alluded to her husband as Mr. Van Schuyler, was just perfectly devoted to Miss Peggy. He had never allowed to. anything to interfere with his affection for Miss Peggy. And English young ladies were perfectly lovely anyway. Mrs. Van Schuyler did not believe in trying to make one's husband domestic.

If he didn't care for domesticity, neither did she. She just despised it and meant to live in a hotel. While Mrs. Van Schuyler was there, her husband was strangely silent. But it turned out on investigation that he did not appear to find the bond of wedlock calling. She allowed him plenty of rope, and he was always to be found straying about at the very end of the tether. So far, I have not heard of either of the Van Schuyler's having applied for a divorce. End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

11. After breakfast, there was nothing. pleasanter one could do than to sit out in the gravelled garden of the hotel under the palm trees and unfurling a green-lined umbrella to bask like a cat in the warmth. And it was here, generally with an offering of flowers that Monsieur René la Vasseur used to join us, with his English sailor hat, his gauzy Parisian tie, and a shepherd's plaid shawl gracefully disposed around his shoulders. Scirmishing and giggling heralded his approach. He was on intimate terms with everybody in the hotel. He had confidences.

for the landlady, bonbons for the children, and if I am not mistaken, a special greeting for the boots. In appearance he was hardly a typical Frenchman. Blonde, thin, and pale, he had only the beginnings of a beard, while his slightly stooping shoulders betrayed the habit of bending at an easel. For Monsieur René was a painter, one of the new school of Bibrieste. He did the most extraordinary little landscapes, all in pink and mauve and arsenic green stripes, which looked well enough about ten yards off, but which were bewildering enough to our British eyes when inspected at close quarters. Other French painters, however, were enthusiastic over his work. "'Tien, très far, this garson,' they would say, gazing at a mountain put in with mauve and rose-colored

lines. "'Beoucaux de vlant. Tres amissant.' "'He is in the movement, this, he tient de monet.' "'A accustomed to the treakly sunset landscape as depicted annually on the walls of Burlington House, we were not a little amazed at Monsieur René's vibrations, notes of dazzling sunlight and white open air. Like most of his painter-compatriots, he was very amusing. For the French artist, unlike his English brother, has a number of theories, which he can usually express in a more or less attractive way. To be sure, he is generally a pessimist,

but to mention this is only to say that the French artist is eminently modern. And if Monsieur René was a pessimist, he was an infinitely do so. diverting one. He was one of the very few young men of our acquaintance who amused Christina. First, we were civil to him because we thought he was rather clever and impecunious, but we learnt later on that he was rich and that the cheap sailor hat and faded shawl were part of his pose. Frenchmen, whatever you may say against them are never snobbish, I announced one day to Christina. When do you ever hear them talk about their money? No, just as in England it is bad taste to talk of one's religion. Money is they,

religion, you know? It was our first winter in the south. The spell of the Riviera was over us. The lazy days crept by, filled with the scent of violets, the warmth of the sunshine, the magnificent panorama of the literal. Our nights were devoted to cotillions, but I never could remember afterwards what we did during those sunny days. Our painter who had claimed our acquaintance from having seen father's pictures in the great, the unique, the epic-making exposition of 18. The was always turning up. Even before the midday breakfast he would run down to the harbor to see the English yachts come in or out, or stroll with us to the flower market, and come back with his arms full of

mimosa, anemones, and violets. Or he would take us both off for a day's painting in the mountains. At least he and Christina used to paint, and I used to lie on my back and look on and eat the sweetmeach which he thoughtfully provided. One day, Monsieur René painted me. He did me in a scar to paint. gown with a scarlet parasol in full sunlight against the blue Mediterranean, and I remember he painted my face in scarlet and purple zigzags. Even my worst enemy has never accused me of vanity,

but I must say I was annoyed. Do not be afraid, mademoiselle. I shall send it to New York. You will never see it again? Those good Americans only speak of our school. Every millionaire of New York desires a Claude Monet or failing him one of his disciples. said Monsieur René soothingly. And, to be sure, on reflection, it did not matter much if my face appeared like a gaily colored zebra on the other side of the Atlantic.

But it was at night when we went to dance at one of the villas or one of the hotels that Monsieur René was in his element. Even your most pessimistic Frenchman will vass, if you give him the chance. He danced madly, breathlessly, abominably, but as a leader of Catillians, our painter was quite unapproachable.

His tact, his finesse, his gaiety were admirable. How easily we amused ourselves during those winter nights. The drive is back after the ball along the bay, packed into the small hotel omnibus, with our hands full of toys and ribbons and flowers,

the spoils of the evening, while a large white moon lit up the coast and the pink and yellow villas were hushed for the night among the orange trees and palms. How pleased Monsieur René looked when I brought home a lapful of tinsel ribbons and tea-roses. He had begun to assume little heirs of semi-proprietorship which were amusing. I think he already suspected me of

cherishing a hopeless passion for him. "'Toné, I, I love, mademoiselle Marguerite,' said Monsieur René one day. "'You know that I am fool of you. But I don't want you to bea'am. But no, but I'm sure I don't want you to do so,' I replied with some asserbity. I always answered him in English. The French tongue is not my strong point, but when I speak my native language to a foreigner, I invariably shout. Without being indiscreet, Monsieur Lavasseur, may I ask why? We were climbing through some orange groves up a hill, and the glistening green leaves overhead were powdered with bloom and heavy with fruit. He tore a spray of orange blossom down and stuck it gingerly through my plates.

"'Tre joly, la Marier,' he said, laughing. "'But very difficult to amusee. oh, but bien-difiscille. There was a fatuity about this little scene which made me thoughtful for a week. Not that I alone was suspected of inclining my eyes in our painter's direction. No one, however unlikely,

was safe in this regard, no one from the stout elderly landlady to the youngest schoolgirl in the hotel. We were one and all supposed to take a tender interest in his proceedings. But I never realized this quite until the night of the tableau vivant, from which moment I fancy Monsieur René was convinced of my hopeless attachment. He was invaluable in our tableau vivant. We did it all between us, he and I,

and it involved the sending of dozens of notes on Monsieur René's part, weird little missives, written half in French, half in English, which were sufficiently bewildering at first. Merci, dear friend, de Votermat. It's so convened? you me prete a cue and I would be a bit all right away we're pet today a four hour

there will have a due tea on serye you do the petite fete wherry faithfully yours René Levasseur Weary was nice enough as an example of English as she spoke but Monsieur René's devotion was expressed

another extraordinary English phrases which she had just missed catching from English ladies in pensions and hotels nothing would remove the impression that my dearling was a proper and ordinary way of addressing a woman. Like most Frenchmen, he had no self-consciousness. The absence of this defect was made up for, I suppose, by exaggerated personal vanity. He had, therefore, no more objection to making himself a false stomach with two or three soft cushions than he had to putting on a cardboard nose or running about on all fours. As the beast, indeed he was delightful wearing my new Sable

boa as a tale, and wooing beauty in the person of our schoolgirl with quite irrepressible ardor. In our Pierrot scenes, too, he was charming, taking my infidelities, as Pierrette, with the prettiest grace in the world. The whole thing was quaint, artistic, delightful.

Monsieur Renée was the hero of the ball that followed. We were to leave the next day. The morning broke grey and stormy, and great waves tipped with white were lashing the pebbles on the beach, as I sat in the hotel garden tired after our late night. Christina had insisted on remaining upstairs

to superintend the packing. Presently, something dark fell in my lap. It was a bouquet of votive violets, while Monsieur Renée's quizzical face at an open window above announced to me my assailant. "'Come'am?' "'In a moment, a leg appeared over the balcony, something bounded out,

and Monsieur Renée was bowing low in front of me.' "'Pover Miss Marguerite,' he murmured. "'Why, poor Miss Marguerite?' I asked in a high voice so as to make sure he understood. "'You've you on allie, like so, in Anglater?' "'It's so triste, la bar.' "'Oh, no, it isn't. We are going back to the London season, you know.

We managed to amuse ourselves over there, although you can't imagine it, immersed as we are in the outer darkness. And then, Monsieur René told me of his hopes of a visit to London some day. when the stormy waters of the channel would have subsided enough for him to adventure on the wild and desperate journey. He told me of the experiences of a friend of his in London, of a fortnight spent at a French hotel near Leicester Square,

of the hideosities of the English Sunday, of the flat-sold boots of Se dame, of the equally unexciting conversational efforts of Se mesieu, all the prejudices and preconceptions which the Parisian packs up in his portmanteau on leaving Paris, and retains intact on his return to his beloved capital. Ah, but London is charming all the same, I objected.

The wind had dropped and the sun was already turning the sea pines to a delicate greenish silver. The day, our final day, was to be fine after all. But it was time to go. We were not, however, to leave in the ordinary and conventional way, in a hotel omnibus and an express train, but a large party of people were to drive us in breaks and carry to the Italian frontier, and we were all to dine together at Ventimilia before we took the train for Genoa. Monsieur René sat close behind me in the break, and whispered reassuringly into my ear, as we dashed

along the mountain road with the Mediterranean spread out below us, and the rocky heights to the left. At the vine-covered trotoria where we stopped to drink kianti and to rest the horses, it was Monsieur René who was so anxious we should all dance a farewell vals in the dusty and deserted salon, while someone strummed a tune on the jingling worn piano, which only woke up once a week when the peasants danced on Sundays. At Ventimilia, where we all walked out to see the view, our painter grew sentimental, and at dinner at the hotel, I think he managed to shed a tear. But everything comes to an end. Dinner was over, and now we were already in the railway carriage with our friends crowding round the open door. And what a charming leave-taking it was.

everybody brought a farewell gift, a bunch of roses, a basket of peaches, a Spanish fan, a china frog, every kind of trifle that one can give, and take, without being compromised. The engine was snorting, mother was snugly ensconced, and Christina was getting out her favorite books.

The guards had three times announced the imminent departure of the train, and still, Monsieur René, climbing once more into the carriage knelt and mocked tragedy at our feet. A horrible suspicion came over us that he meant to come, too. But a final whistle sounded. Monsieur René rose to his feet,

and, crushing my fingers, bent over me as he whispered tenderly, soothingly, reassuringly the words, L'Avenir is audacue, I vintless to say, my Parisian admirer has not yet braved the terrors of the channel passage for my sake. Now and again he sends a Figuero or a Goulouet, containing a fervid article about his pictures, for Monsieur René, it would seem, is on the way to fame. And once or twice he has written to say that he intends to come and make serious studies of

his etonement brouillard de Londre. But he never comes, nor does he, I shrewdly suspect, intend to. Paris has swallowed him up. End of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Twelve.

Duncan Clive's hamlet had taken the town. Christina roundly declared it was a revolting exhibition, but I don't know good acting from bad, so this last reading of the great part was good enough for me. True, it was a smug, sentimental South Kensingtonian hamlet, but I in common with the rest of the public became enthusiastic over Mr. Duncan Clive.

We are only human, and my ardor was possibly not unconnected, with the fact that the manager of the Procenium Theatre was the fashion. Passions in art are eminently contagious. He had the look of a Roman Emperor. His large round head, his square, clean-shaven jaw, and his broad shoulders made him an effective stage figure, though in private life he often looked depressed and bilious and affected a humble and slightly apologetic manner.

If you can picture Nero or Caligula in a sublime frock-coat, sitting down meekly over the teacups and talking of elevating the drama and improving the public taste, you have a vision of Mr. Duncan Clive as he used to appear in our drawing room. He was an actor-manager, so he had to talk about improving the public taste, and yet keep one eye on the box office. He spent fabulous sums on the production of his pieces, and all the town would flock to see his real empire furniture and his genuine obisone carpets. Whether he is a great actor or not, I argued one day with Christina, at any rate you must admit he has done a great deal for the stage.

My dear, you mean for the stage carpenter, replied my sister, in an aggravatingly conclusive tone of voice. Hours was the sort of house to which everybody goes. From ambassadors to interviewers there was hardly anybody we didn't know, and Christina and I were told to be civil to all and sundry, but there was no need to admonish me to be civil to the new hamlet. I was in the studio squeezing out colors onto father's palette, one day when Mr. Duncan Clive was announced. There he stood in the flesh, my favorite stage lover, looking very blue about the jaw and very dazzling about the necktie,

and he waited a second or two holding back the heavy portier, just as he always did when he wished to make an effective entrance on the stage. Then he stepped forward rapidly, with a brilliant, and smile, shaking hands with Father and making me a low and deferential bow. Father was to paint him as Hamlet for the next Academy, and he had chosen to be done, not with Yorick's skull or in the famous soliloquy, but in the scene with Gilderunstern, where he snaps the pipe in two. Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Was the line to be depicted? And to be sure, Duncan Clive made an imposing figure enough

in his somber doublet, standing with his chin a little forward, and his eyes turned suspiciously towards the spectator. It was characteristic of the man to have chosen that particular episode that a special pose, for he was, above all things, undecided and distrustful. He wanted to be in the movement, but he wished to be well with the British public. He would like to have mounted head a gobbler, had there been a part big enough for him to play. He was capable of producing Meitolink, but for his doubts about filling the stalls. To see him humbly asking the opinion of the critics at one of his first night suppers on the stage of the Procenium Theatre

was a curious and instructive spectacle. He asked everybody's advice. That was one of his chief attractions in the eyes of women, and he even asked mine. Mr. Duncan Clive had beautiful suggestive hands, which he used a good deal when he talked, and a wandering, shifty eye,

which traveled all round the room, even when he bent towards you in one of his many confidences. He had interminable confidences to make. He liked to talk about his early life, only as his imagination was vivid and his memory defective, his early life was apt to be colored by the mood of the moment. On dreary dark November days, when the trees outside seemed to ooze grime and soot, he would tell you in thrilling tones that he began life barefoot, selling newspapers in the streets

or calling cabs at the theatre doors. And how one gruesome night when he was shivering in the slush, he had made a vow that he would produce Shakespearean plays at a London theatre. before he was thirty years of age. Other days when the sun shone and the wind rioted out of doors, he would recall a rose-shaded drawing-room window giving on a blue sea, and a gentle-voiced mother who read browning to him as he sat on soft cushions at her feet. No, certainly, the accounts of Mr. Duncan Clive's early training did not, as his stage carpenter would have expressed it, join.

But I am firmly convinced that, while he was talking to you, while his deep-set, hungry, grey eyes sought inspiration now in yours, and now in the fairyland inside the fire, he believed for the moment what he was saying. Most women like to listen to Duncan Clive's confidences, especially as Mrs. Duncan Clive did not usually accompany him when he paid afternoon calls.

He had married the, walking lady, of a traveling company some years ago, but this fact by no means interfered with his success with the sex. Who cares whether Orlando, Charles Surface or young Mirabell has a wife in Bayswater, or a troop of brats in Bedford Park. Not even the most romantic

schoolgirl cares. Young Mirabelle carries the glamour of the footlights with him wherever he goes. But this glamour, to be sure, rather interferes with the due enjoyment of one's idol who is apt to be surrounded by admiring devotees. Does Orlando, in white gardenia and patent leather boots, but offer you

his arm to go down to supper, and You are pursued by a crowd of admiring ladies who hope to snatch him from you. You are permitted to have neither your cavalier nor your supper. You gaze wistfully at the salads and aspects while an elderly lady buttonholes Orlando, reminding him archly that they met six years ago in a railway carriage in Switzerland, and proceeds on the strength of this acquaintanceship to introduce to him her three nieces from Huddersfield, who are so devoted to dear Mr. Clive's acting. Lady Susan takes him by the arm into a distant course,

from whence he is presently dug out by the Duchess of Birmingham, who is, just dying to present him, to Miss Van Hoyt. The successful actor-manager is always engulfed in a sea of petticoats. But all this I could have borne if it had not been for Lelage Lee. She was the last straw. I could have forgiven him his wife, she didn't seem to count, and I could have forgiven him Miss Montmorency, the leading lady, for I suspected him of being jealous of her success with the dress circle. But for Miss Laylidge Lee, who played the pert chambermaids in comedy, and who undertook the singing fairies in Shakespearean productions, for her I had no toleration.

We had just had a card for a supper party on the stage of the proscenium theatre, and the matter was being discussed. "'In my young days,' said Mother doubtfully, "'girls wouldn't have been taken to supper parties behind the scenes.' "'They're tremendously good fun,' said Lady Sue. Susan, who was paying one of her seven-minute's visits, and quite good form, you know, and all that sort of thing. Lady Rooschmont never misses one of Duncan's parties, and what's more, she brings her daughter. So do Mrs. Stanley Goring, and most of that lot. You won't meet

any actresses there, my dear lady, I can tell you. We might as well go to a crush in Mayfair, then, said Christina. Oh, it's not as bad as all that, replied Lady Susan. What I meant to say was that Miss Lee is the only actress who ever appears at Duncan's suppers, and she is perfectly good form, you know. Her father was a dean. They always are, said Christina, but Lady Susan pretended not to hear. At half-past eleven on the night in question we drove up to the proscenium just as the audience was streaming out. It was the hundredth night of a piece in three acts called Hippocracy, which had drawn the town for some three months. Going down the soft, carpeted staircase, lighted by pink-shaded lamps and lined with mirrors and laurel wreaths,

called by Duncan Clive on his last American tour, we passed the entrance to the stalls, the open door revealing a now empty house, with rows of pale, pink, and white chairs, and then mounting a step or two, turned sharply to the right where a narrow door gave on to the wings. The stage was set with the last act of hypocrisy, a scene which depicted the precincts of the Camellia Club, in which a masked ball is supposed to take place. Duncan Clive had not had time to change his dress, and he now stood at the door with brown grease paint on his cheek and blue pencil lines around his eyes, smiling and welcoming his guests. One or two modish women, notorious for their bohemian tastes, had brought their young daughters,

who, surprised, delighted, and a little bit frightened at the novel scene in which they found themselves, whispered together in corners, all a flutter with excitement and curiosity. The critics, imperturbable as usual, preserved a mask-like expression of countenance while their listened to the confidences of one or two leading actors on the vexed subject of their parts, and a phalanx of men about town, a trifle bald about the temples, a little weary about the eyes, gradually gathered on the stage. All these exquisitely dressed individuals addressed the actor-manager as Duncan, pressed the hand, while they whispered a compliment into the ear of Miss Layledge-Lee, and then distributed themselves among the society dames who graced the scene

with their presence. Meanwhile, the heat was stifling, and the footlights below with the electric lights in the flies cast an unbecoming radiance on many a dyed head and wrinkled visage. In the distance a middle-aged and faded woman covered in diamonds had engaged Mr. Clive in close confabulation. That's Mrs. Stanley Goring.

Good family, rich, nice husband, but goes in for the stage, don't you know? whispered Lady Susan. She's never happy unless she's got Duncan to lunch or supper. A buffet had been hastily erected by a dozen men in theatrical livery, and here cabinet ministers, fashionable doctors, blonde drus, white-headed generals, eminent tragedians, and the press scrambled for champagne bottles,

sandwiches and cigars. A stout, red-faced man who looked like a navvy in evening dress was surrounded by a little court, all anxious to hear what he said. That is Brown, the stock exchange speculator, continued Lady Susan. He makes corners in things, and people want to know which way the wind's going to blow.

I'm just going to blow. I'm just going to to make love to him myself. I want a straight tip about Lake Shores. There's Percy Whitemore, the young man from the Thalia. Never mention the stage if you talk to him, my dear. Always discuss horses. He likes to be taken for a cavalry man. Meanwhile, Mrs. Duncan Clive, in a drab silk gown, hovered vaguely with an apologetic smile in the background, and a gallant old general who was devoted to the stage surprised her very much by detaining her in conversation. Miss Momoran, who, it was supposed, had not only a past, but a present, had swept out, smothered in a fur-police, and point-laced directly the play was over.

As Lady Susan had predicted, Miss Layledge Lee was the only actress there. For the daughter of an eminent ecclesiastic, I must say that Miss Lee displayed a considerable knowledge of the ways of an effete and over-civilized world. She was a very pretty woman, even with that flaunting dab of bruges on each cheek and those deep blue smudges around her eyes, even with that fixed conventional smile and that languorous professional glance. Already a little circle of men surrounded her, so that it was almost impossible to approach, but it was to Mr. Brown, the stock exchange magnet, that she seemed to have most to say. One heard her inquiring feverishly about Brighton A's and expressing doubts about the future of Grand Trunks.

She wished to be well, too, with Mrs. Stanley Goring, and detained that lady's hand in her own while she shot several killing glasses over her shoulder at the critic of the Daily Telephone. Mr. Duncan Clive had pressed my hand and murmured something pretty when I arrived, but he had not yet found time to come and speak to me. I do think this sort of thing is overrated, don't you?

I whispered to Christina. They were bringing on a fresh supply of champagne now, and the men were beginning to smoke and tell stories. The smart women were slipping out with their young daughters through the flapping canvas doors. Father thought it was time to go, and so did I. Picking up our skirts, we stepped cautiously along the dusty world behind the scenes, threading our way through virgin forests, dungeon walls, and flowering June meadows to the stage door. It was pitch dark, but we could see outside stood a neat brougham and a man's back.

The back, as we emerged into the street, turned out to be that of Mr. Duncan Clive. With the grease paint still on his lips, my idol was imprinting a farewell salute on the Bismuth-Wightened arm of Miss Layledge Lee, who laughed as she slammed the carriage door. It was an evidently not unrehearsed stage idol. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of My Flortations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Thirteen

Christina, I said thoughtfully. one day when we were alone. You are a young woman of sense and observation. Did it not occur to you when Mr. John Ford dined here last night that he had the cachet, the unmistakable appearance of a husband? What do you mean, Peggy? What ridiculous notions you always have? Why, everybody knows that John Ford is not and has never been married. Oh, that's nothing, I retorted. I tell you he was born to be henpecked and to have a carriage with fat horses and never drive. in it and to pay long expense of milliner's bills. The man looks like a husband. Some men don't, and never will. Let them marry three times and they never look as he looks.

Well, he hasn't shown any indecent haste about taking a wife, said Christina. He must be every day of fifty. No, I said meditatively. He is forty-six. He likes French cooking and Italian operas. Dear old fossils like the Travatorre and the Traviata, he is slightly rotund, he will give his wife a great many diamonds, and he will probably want to live in Prince's Gate. Now, if I were to marry a stockbroker, I would never wear diamonds. It is so like the city to wear diamonds. As a mere matter of taste, I should have nothing but sapphires and pearls. And I should draw the line at Princess Gate. As you have only seen the man twice in your whole existence, I don't think you need to disturb your about the locality you will inhabit with him just yet. Christina, don't interrupt my daydream. As a matter of fact, I should insist on Mayfair. Not Charles Street, it's too gloomy, nor South Audley Street, it's too noisy. But say, Park Street, or one of those cozy little cross streets, a red house with a white door and copper fixings.

Brass would be more appropriate for you, my dear girl, said Christina sententiously, and then the thing slipped from my memory as the butter, brought up a bunch of orchids from Mr. Van Schuyler and a letter containing an invitation to dinner with Mr. Julian Clancy. John Ford, the well-known stockbroker, had made his first appearance in our house about a fortnight before. He had been brought to the studio by a pretty showy Jewess, who was a great admirer of fathers, and who liked to run in and out at all hours and bring whom she liked. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and clean-shaven, and had bright blue eyes set in a square face, a face which was red all over.

He was not quite ugly, but his manners were odd. He was very silent. If he did speak, it was principally of hunting and shootin. But when he left the house, he was the possessor of father's new academy picture for which he had offered, in an offhand way in a distant corner, the sum of fifteen hundred pounds. The next time we saw him it was a dinner, at one of our big dinners. It was one of those nights when I am simple and natural,

and my frog happened to be one of those white, soft, fluffy things, which cost a small fortune and looked so inexpensive. At first the conversation did not flourish, but Mr. John Ford looked furtively and approvingly out of the corner of his eye as he ate his soup. Nice little frock, he said at last. Like to see little girls in white. Ought always to dress in white. And this was the first and last occasion on which Mr. John Ford has ever paid me a compliment. Talking, as I have said, was somewhat hard work, but before the dinner was over, he had told me the most of his tastes and predilections.

In a world where we change our idols every six months, it was refreshing to find anyone with simple, old-fashioned tastes, a liking for pictures with sunset skies and waxen-faced maidens, for love stories which end happily, and for oleagenous Italian melodies. These were the things in fashion in Mr. John Ford's heyday of youth, and they suggested a capacity for fidelity which was encouraging. And such is the adaptability of woman and and the egoism of man, that before we left the dinner table, Mr. Ford was convinced that I cared for these things also. But it was not of academy pictures and three-volume novels that I wished to talk with Mr. John Ford. Contangos, debentures, bears, and bulls have always been words of

strange fascination for me, probably because I am totally ignorant of everything that goes on in the city. It came over me like madness that I wanted to have a little gamble, and Mr. John Ford offered to give me a straight tip as he co-combe. called it, about Patagonians. And I, who never possessed more than one pound ten shillings altogether during my whole life, felt quite dissipated and worldly and reckless as we discussed the little flutter which I was to undertake. There is hardly anything so infectious as the disease of gambling. For the rest of the evening Mr. John Ford did not come near me, but Christina admitted afterwards that he was watching me all the time. And when he left, I was told

that my financial affairs were to be seen to at once. How excited, how dissipated I felt. During the next few days, I received several business-looking blue envelopes in Mr. John Ford's handwriting, in which I was informed that Patagonians were dull, and afterwards that there was a boom in the same financial commodity, and then again that a fall was expected soon to be followed by a rise, all of which was Greek to me, but which sounded very reckless. But one day, a week later, I had a shock, which will always be a date in my history. Christina and I were sitting alone over the teacups.

A blue business-looking envelope was once more served up on a silver tray. I began to feel like a Rothschild or a bearing. What's this? I muttered, as I began to seize the purport of the few neatly written lines which meandered over a large page. He's bought me five shares in Patagonians at ten-pound. each. I've got to pay fifty pounds during the next fortnight. Great heavens, I gasped. Why, I haven't got a penny in the world. I was only joking. An odd sort of joke, my dear child, said Christina dryly. Couldn't you have remembered that

rather important fact before? Oh, I can't pay it. What's to be done? Father must be told, and, and... I shall never dare to look him in the face again. "'Who, father?' "'No, Mr. Ford. "'And I like him so much with his little blue eyes and his face which is red all over.' "'Wire him to come.' "'Explain it nicely,' said Christina. "'With what I thought then was a devilish calm,

"'as she produced some telegraph forms, "'pushed the ink and pen towards me and rang the bell for the man. "'In less than an hour John Ford was ushered into the room. "'Regardless of appearances, "'I had had a thoroughly feminine cry, and was now huddled up on the sofa with red and eyelids and roughened hair, a dismal-looking hostess to receive afternoon callers. He came in, shut the door, and sat down, gazing at me in astonished silence.

"'What's the matter, Miss Winman?' he said at last. "'Been sending some poor devil about his business and regretted it already, eh?' "'No, no, I never sent anybody about their business. I—I—I hate business anyway.' "'And, oh, why did you? buy all those shares? All those shares? Why, I only got you fifty pounds worth.

I've just bought six thousand pounds worth myself. But I haven't got it, and I can't get it. I've counted my money carefully, and I find I possess exactly one pound, five shilling, seven and a half pence. John Ford laughed. Well, I think I can manage to get rid of them for you. In fact, I know a chap who wants five more.

To anyone not... blinded by financial terrors, the little subterfuge must have been palpable. As it was, I never saw it till long afterwards. Do you really know of someone who wants them? I think you are an angel, I said fervently. Sean Ford blushed redder than ever, and just for a minute there was an embarrassing silence. We did not mention Patagonians again, and yet he stayed quite a long time that afternoon. At parting, we looked straight at each other, and I knew from that minute forward we should be firm allies.

There has never been a moment's doubt from that day that we should get on. Six months have gone by since that day, and lots of things have happened. Everyone in the house is very nice to me just now. Father calls me every minute into the studio to ask my advice. Mother, dear mother, looks at me solicitously and follows me about the house with a biscuit and a glass of port wine. Christina slips out of the room when the doorbell rings. Nobody contradicts me.

It reminds me of once long ago when I was ill. And to be sure I am tired, very tired. Such quantities of gushing notes arrive by every post, which all require an enthusiastic answer and large brown paper parcels with many wrappings which have to be undone. I might be qualifying for the treadmill, I have trapped so often up the bare staircases of empty houses where elderly ladies, smelling of gin and water,

implore me to convince myself how excellent are the dust-bins and what convenient linen cupboards there are next to the garrets. I bring home racking headaches from emporiums in the Tottenham Court Road once I emerge having ordered Louis XVIth clocks for all the servants' bedrooms and the particular shade of blue which I detest for the dining-room chairs. Other days it is true, I slink up. of the shop with the excuse that the drawing-room carpet which I have been choosing for the last two hours is for a friend, and that nothing can be decided without consulting her. But this transparent fabrication is invariably received

with looks of withering scorn by the shopman in attendance. I am getting accustomed to this, if not to the ineffable young person in black silk who presides at Madame Virginis, and who always leaves me after one of our lengthened and heating interviews, with the pleasing impression that I am undersized, hopelessly plain, and dressed in shocking taste. Her piercing black eyes look me through. They discover the weak points in the cut of my nethermost petticoat, and I dare swear, if the truth be told, that she is perfectly aware that I have a small hole in the heel of my stocking.

But the process of gentle, low-voiced bullying which goes on at the milliners only leaves one more obstinate, and I think I prefer my sworn enemy, the ineffable young person, to that other imperious hebe at the hat-shop, who looks aggravatingly pretty in every shape, however eccentric, and who is of opinion that Madam cannot do better than take a straw saucer trimmed with stuffed birds and strawberries, seeing that Mrs. Langtree has definitely made it the mode.

There are those nervous interviews, too, with grinning, sporting-looking attorneys in Lincoln's Inn Fields, when perfectly incomprehensible documents without stops are read out to me, and I finally put my signature on a parchment, which makes one feel for all the world as if one were signing a death warrant. There are the relations to, unknown aunts and cousins

from the provinces and the suburbs who suddenly appear, asking one disagreeable questions about one's age and who generally sigh, and hope it will all be for the best. Then there is the advice, the reams of good advice, which they and my other friend shower upon me.

I am assured, what I can well believe, that it is the first year which is so tried, Some would have me change the savories at dinner constantly, others insist that I must begin with morning prayers, while another division conjure me not to allow smoking in the dining-room. I am implored not to object to clubs, am warned about pretty parlour-maids, am told not to be too credulous, and am supplicated not to show signs of jealousy as being quite out of date. A few pray me to be tolerant of old friends, race meetings, and cigarettes.

while many more urge me to keep an observant eye on sisters-in-law, checkbooks and bills. There is all this, and as a final blow, there is the mackerel kettle. I think on the whole, the mackerel kettle has given me more weary days in sleepless nights than any other article I have had to procure. In every book on furnishing, we find the mackerel kettle placed foremost in the list of indispensable things. In no illustrated catalogue of ironmongry is a tempting little woodcut of a mackerel kettle omitted, and yet in the flesh, or rather in the metal, the mackerel kettle forever alludes us. Fabulous sums are expanded in handsome cabs scouring the Tottenham Court Road in pursuit of this

phantom article of hardware, and I begin to think that my chances of happiness may be seriously compromised. But time flies by. The day is very near now. One foggy winter afternoon, I toil upstairs to Christina's room, dragging after me, with the help of the maid, a long, brown, wooden box. What do you think has come? I demand breathlessly, bursting into the room where Christina is trying to read an article on the underpayment of feminine labor in one of the reviews. Put it down, Sarah.

Unbuckle the strap, quick. Woman-like, my sister throws down the twentieth century, and we bend curiously over the box, as the... The maid lifts gingerly out a garment of shimmering white and silver from under a layer of tool. Symbols of the eternal feminine. Those lengths of glittering satin flaunt themselves over the sofa and along the floor, lighting up the dim little room with their sumptuous whiteness, while, like a June cloud,

the foam of tool floats for an instant in the winter dusk. It is my wedding gown. End of Chapter 13. End of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon