The last words were spoken with slow intention.
"What do you mean?" said Lady Locke hastily.
"Here we are at the post-office. Would it not be the proper thing to do to get some stamps? No? Then let us stop at the linen-draper's. I feel a strong desire to buy some village frilling. And there are some deliciously coarse-looking pocket-handkerchiefs in the window, about a yard square. I must get a dozen of those."
At lunch that day Lord Reggie announced that he had composed a beautiful anthem on the words—
"Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely; thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks."
"They sound exactly like something of Esme's," he said, "but really they are taken from the 'Song of Solomon.' I had no idea that the Bible was so intensely artistic. There are passages in the Book of Job that I should not be ashamed to have written."
"You remind me of a certain lady writer who is very popular in kitchen circles," said Esmé, "and whose husband once told me that she had founded her style upon Mr. Ruskin and the better parts of the Bible. She brings out about seven books every year, I am told, and they are all about sailors, of whom she knows absolutely nothing. I am perpetually meeting her, and she always asks me to lunch, and says she knows my brother. She seems to connect my poor brother with lunch in some curious way. I shall never lunch with her, but she will always ask me."
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast," Mrs. Windsor said, with a little air of aptness.
"That is one of the greatest fallacies of a melancholy age," Esmé answered, arranging the huge moonstone in his tie with a plump hand; "suicide would be the better word. 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' has made suicide quite the rage. A number of most respectable ladies, without the vestige of a past among them, have put an end to themselves lately, I am told. To die naturally has become most unfashionable, but no doubt the tide will turn presently."
"I wonder if people realise how dangerous they may be in their writings," said Lady Locke.