“They play well!” she commented.
“People often tell me so.”
“It must make one restless, dissatisfied, that yearning, yearning music continually at the door?”
Madame Wetme sighed.
“It makes you often long,” she said, “to begin your life again!”
“Again?”
“Really it’s queer I came to yoke myself with a man so little fine....”
“Still——! If he’s open-handed,” the duchess murmured as she left the room.
IV
One grey, unsettled morning (it was the first of June) the English Colony of Kairoulla[4] awoke in arms. It usually did when the Embassy entertained. But the omissions of the Ambassador, were, as old Mr Ladboyson the longest-established member of the colony declared, “not to be fathomed,” and many of those overlooked declared they should go all the same. Why should Mrs Montgomery (who, when all was said and done, was nothing but a governess) be invited and not Mrs Barleymoon who was “nothing” (in the most distinguished sense of the word) at all? Mrs Barleymoon’s position, as a captain’s widow with means, unquestionably came before Mrs Montgomery’s, who drew a salary, and hadn’t often an h.