write, it is of the slime and the filth that they have smelt, crying to
the world that the blue of the skies and the beauty of a rose are
things engendered of sentimental minds unable to see the real, the
vital things of life.

To this community of _poseurs_ Lady Durwent jingled her town house and
her title--and the response was instantaneous. She became the hostess
of a series of dinner-parties which gradually made her the subject of
paragraphs in the chatty columns of the press, and of whole chapters in
the gossip of London's refined circles.

Her natural cheerfulness expanded like a sunflower, and when her son
Malcolm secured a commission in the --th Hussars, her triumph was
complete. Even the staggering news that Dick had been taken away from
Eton to avoid expulsion for drunkenness proved only a momentary cloud
on the broad horizon of her contentment.

When she was nineteen years of age Elise came to live with her mother,
and as the fiery beauty of the child had mellowed into a sort of
smouldering charm that owed something to the mystic atmosphere of
convent life, Lady Durwent felt that an ally of importance had entered
the arena.

Thus four years passed, and in 1913 (had peeresses been in the habit of
taking inventories) Lady Durwent could have issued a statement somewhat
as follows:


ASSETS.