"D'you think I'm unduly vain?" she asked.
"Genius demands vanity. But one comes back to the old question: what is behind it? One thinks of you in six years' time and asks oneself what will be left. You have been everywhere, Lady Lilith, and met every one whom the world considers worth meeting—they were not too numerous? No?—and you have read so much.... In six years' time you will be the best known woman in London, but there will be nothing left for you to do."
"There are always new experiences. When I had that accident in the New Forest, a man came from the other end of England, because he'd fallen in love with my photograph. He said he couldn't marry any one else after seeing me."
"It is surfeiting to be easily loved," Arden sighed. "One does not shoot sitting birds. Some day, perhaps, Lady Lilith will meet a man who goes to the other end of England to avoid her. That will be a new experience. She will follow him, of course. To find a heart will be the greatest experience of all. One will watch your career with interest."
"And describe it? Or are you afraid to risk my friendship?"
"The only book that could offend Lady Lilith is one in which she does not appear."
For the next six months Arden was compelled to study her through the press. Loring went abroad for the winter in his yacht, Lady Knightrider withdrew to Scotland, and Lord Crawleigh moved his seat of government from Berkeley Square to Hampshire. Despite the rival claims of a general election, however, she secured creditable space in the daily and weekly papers. A ball at Crawleigh Abbey was followed by an abortive rumour of her engagement to her cousin Lord John Carstairs. A prompt and unambiguous disclaimer was issued, but the findings of the commission, which Lord Crawleigh appointed under his own chairmanship to investigate his daughter's conduct, were such that he deemed it prudent to transfer his seat of government from Hampshire to Cap Martin. A series of photographs from the Riviera correspondent of the 'Catch' shewed her walking demurely with her father, playing tennis and participating less demurely in a battle of flowers and a fancy-dress carnival.
In the spring of 1910 public interest was deflected to another branch of the family, for Loring's engagement to Sonia Dainton was announced. But by that time, as Arden pointed out, a man had only himself to blame if he did not know all that was to be known of Lady Barbara Neave.
"How poor Jim must loathe all this self-advertising," said Jack Waring, when he met Arden at the County Club to discuss the engagement. "I've never even seen her, but I've had her and her hats and her clothes thrust under my eyes by these infernal papers till I'm sick of them. She's talented, she's charming. I know all the things she said to all the big pots in India. When she is twenty-one she comes in for all her godfather's money on condition that she marries a Catholic.... I suppose there must be a public for this kind of stuff, or the papers wouldn't print it; but she's on the level of a musical-comedy star. Arden, my lad, I'm an old man, but I swear people had a little more dignity and restraint in my young days. The one good thing about the court mourning is that she doesn't get so much opportunity for her antics."
"She'll emerge again, when it's over," Arden predicted. "Meanwhile, London is becoming very tiresome. Has life lost its savour? Are we growing old? One would give much for the tonic of a good scandal."