"In truth, then, I do not sympathise with you. The thing lost is too small, too mean to justify unhappiness."
"But, Madame Goesler, you are a rich woman."
"Well?"
"If you were to lose it all, would you not be unhappy? It has been my ambition to live here in London as one of a special set which dominates all other sets in our English world. To do so a man should have means of his own. I have none; and yet I have tried it,—thinking that I could earn my bread at it as men do at other professions. I acknowledge that I should not have thought so. No man should attempt what I have attempted without means, at any rate to live on if he fail; but I am not the less unhappy because I have been silly."
"What will you do?"
"Ah,—what? Another friend asked me that the other day, and I told her that I should vanish."
"Who was that friend?"
"Lady Laura."
"She is in London again now?"
"Yes; she and her father are in Portman Square."