She laid emphasis on the word and the Half Man with the Moon Face took his cue from it and threw a pose of almost painful sincerity.

"Why is it," continued the Chief Lady Guest, "that men always insist on dealing with us just as if we were playthings, just so many dressed-up dolls?"

Here the Debutante immediately did a doll.

"If a woman is attractive and beautiful," the lady went on, "so much the better." (She had no intention of letting go of the doll business entirely.) "But surely you men ought to value us as something more than mere dolls?"

She might have pursued the topic, but at this moment the Smooth Gentleman, who made a rule of standing in all round, and had broken into a side conversation with the Silent Host, was overheard to say something about women's sense of humour.

The table was in a turmoil in a moment, three of the ladies speaking at once. To deny a woman's sense of humour is the last form of social insult.

"I entirely disagree with you," said the Chief Lady Guest, speaking very severely. "I know it from my own case, from my own sense of humour and from observation. Last week, for example, we measured no less than seventy-five factory girls—"

"Well, I'm sure," said the Lady-with-the-Bust, "I don't know what men mean by our not having a sense of humour. I'm sure I have. I know I went last week to a vaudeville, and I just laughed all through. Of course I can't read Mark Twain, or anything like that, but then I don't call that funny, do you?" she concluded, turning to the Hostess.

But the Hostess, feeling somehow that the ground was dangerous, had already risen, and in a moment more the ladies had floated out of the room and upstairs to the drawing-room, where they spread themselves about in easy chairs in billows of pretty coloured silk.

"How charming it is," the Chief Lady Guest began, "to find men coming so entirely to our point of view! Do you know it was so delightful to-night: I hardly heard a word of dissent or contradiction."

Thus they talked; except the Soft Lady, who had slipped into a seat by herself with an album over her knees, and with an empty chair on either side of her. There she waited.

Meantime, down below, the men had shifted into chairs to one end of the table and the Heavy Host was shoving cigars at them, thick as ropes, and passing the port wine, with his big fist round the neck of the decanter. But for his success in life he could have had a place as a bar tender anywhere.

None of them spoke till the cigars were well alight.

Then the Host said very deliberately, taking each word at his leisure, with smoke in between:

"Of course—this—suffrage business—"

"Tommyrot!" exclaimed the Smooth Gentleman, with great alacrity, his mask entirely laid aside.