"My sister says I ought to scold the child for what she calls her 'fast' way with young men."
"Oh, nonsense!" Lord Henry exclaimed. "What can you tell the girl?—to be less fascinating, to be less beautiful, to be less full of life? That would be as futile as it would be deforming. You can only watch her so that she does not come to harm, or fall into the hands of a villain. You cannot moralise. I think you have been wonderful to restrain yourself so far. But continue doing so."
"You see, I remember what I was at her age!" the widow admitted bashfully.
Lord Henry laughed, and in a moment she laughed with him.
He accompanied her to the door, and feeling very much relieved she rejoined her daughter.
At half-past four that afternoon, just as the car bearing away Lord Henry's last out-patient, had glided out of the drive, he sent for St. Maur.
The day had been a particularly heavy one. Unfortunate, miserable, and beautiful girls, with everything they could wish for, had come in their dozens for the last month, with nervous tics that utterly marred their beauty and blighted their lives. He had seen no less than three that day. Business men, Army men, clergymen, married women, mothers, each with some kind of nervous catch in their voices, uncontrollable spasms in their limbs, stammers, or obsessions,—everyone was now beginning to hear of Lord Henry's wonderful success in dealing with such cases, and he was getting inconveniently busy.
Only a few were perhaps aware that he derived most of his skill in the handling of these nervous disorders from the teaching of a certain Austrian Jew of brilliant genius; but even those who knew this fact also recognised that he had shown such enormous ability in adapting the principles of his Semitic master to modern English conditions that he was entitled to be regarded quite as much as an innovator as a disciple.