"The new note!"
"Why should the new note require preparation against me?"
"I said for you. Possibly we may find out this evening. Besides Delia is in a rest cure as usual. So there is no hostess."
Delia was Max Elliot's wife, a graceful nonentity who, having never done a stroke of work in her life, was perpetually breaking down, and being obliged to rest expensively under the supervision of fashionable doctors. She was now in Hampstead, enclosed in a pale green chamber, living on milk and a preparation called "Marella," and enjoying injections of salt water. She was also being massaged perpetually by a stout young woman from Sweden, and was deprived of her letters. "No letters!" was a prescription which had made her physician celebrated.
"Oh, the peace of it!" Mrs. Elliot was faintly murmuring to the athletic masseuse, at the very moment when Charmian said:
"There very seldom is a hostess. Poor Max Elliot!"
"He's accustomed to it. And Delia must be doing something. This time she may be cured. Life originally issued from the sea, they say."
"Near Margate, I suppose. What a mystery existence is!"
"Are you going to be tiresome to-night?"
"No, I won't, I won't. But if he plays his Te Deum I know I shall sleep like a tired child."