Anyway, it appeared that the mistress of Crosby Ledgers could be
charming, and could also be exactly the reverse. She was a creature of
whims and did precisely as she pleased. Everything she did apparently
was acceptable to Lord Dunstable, who admired her blindly. But in one
point at least she was a disappointed woman. Her son, an unsatisfactory
youth of two-and-twenty, was seldom to be seen under his parents' roof,
and it was rumoured that he had already given them a great deal of
trouble.

"The dreadful thing, my dear, is the _games_ they play!" said the wife
of a dramatist, whose one successful piece had been followed by years of
ill-fortune.

"_Games?_" said Doris. "Do you mean cards--for money?"

"Oh, dear no! Intellectual games. _Bouts-rimés;_ translations--Lady
Dunstable looks out the bits and some people think the
words--beforehand; paragraphs on a subject--in a particular
style--Pater's, or Ruskin's, or Carlyle's. Each person throws two slips
into a hat. On one you write the subject, on another the name of the
author whose style is to be imitated. Then you draw. Of course Lady
Dunstable carries off all the honours. But then everybody believes she
spends all the mornings preparing these things. She never comes down
till nearly lunch."

"This is really appalling!" said Doris, with round eyes. "I have
forgotten everything I ever knew."

As for her own impressions of the great lady, she had only seen her once
in the semi-darkness of the lecture-room, and could only remember a