through a fairly dull season among country neighbors on the same bent.

Two of them, including Tamara, had secured suitable husbands, and at
the age of twenty-three years the latter had been left a well-dowered
widow.

She had worn mourning for just the right period, had looked after her
affairs--handed James' place over with a good grace to James' brother
and an unliked sister-in-law, and finally, when she was wearing grays
and mauves, two years almost after her loss, she had allowed herself to
be persuaded into taking a trip to Egypt with her friend, Millicent
Hardcastle, who was recovering from influenza.

It had caused the greatest flutter at Underwood, this journey abroad!
None of them had been further than Dresden, where each girl had learned
German for a year or so before her presentation.

And what had Egypt done for Tamara? Lifted just one pretty white
eyelid, perhaps. Stirred something which only once or twice in her life
she had been dimly conscious of. Everything had been a kind of shock to
her. A shock of an agreeable description. And once driving at night in
the orange groves of Ghezireh, after some open-air fête, the heavy
scent and intoxicating atmosphere had made her blood tingle. She felt
it was almost wrong that things should so appeal to her senses.
Anything which appealed deliberately to the senses had always been
considered as more than almost wrong at Underwood Chase.

The senses were improper things which Aunt Clara for her part never
quite understood why the Almighty should have had the bad taste to
permit in human beings.