that he's nothing particular besides. I don't mind a little mild honesty, but it should be kept in the background."
"I've got a large piece of honesty somewhere about me," said Jack. "I can't always lay my hand on it, but every now and then I feel it like a great lump inside me."
"Yes," said Dodo, "I believe you are fundamentally honest, Jack. I've always thought that."
"Does that mean that he is not honest in ordinary matters?" asked Miss Grantham. "I've noticed that people who are fundamentally truthful, seldom tell the truth."
"In a way it does," said Dodo. "But I'm sure Jack would be honest in any case where it really mattered."
"Oh, I sha'n't steal your spoons, you know," said Miss Grantham.
"That's only because you don't really want them," remarked Dodo. "I can conceive you stealing anything you wanted."
"Trample on me," said Miss Grantham serenely. "Tell us what I should steal."
"Oh, you'd steal lots of things," said Dodo. "You'd steal anyone's self-respect if you could manage to, and you couldn't get what you wanted any other way. Oh, yes, you'd steal anything important. Jack wouldn't. He'd stop just short of that; he would never be really disloyal. He'd finger things to any extent, but I am pretty sure that he would drop them at the last minute."
"How dreadfully unpleasant I am really," said Miss Grantham meditatively. "A kind of Eugene Aram."
Jack was acutely uncomfortable, but he had the satisfaction of believing that what Dodo said about him was true. He had come to the same conclusion himself two nights ago. He believed that he would stop short of any act of disloyalty, but he did not care about hearing Dodo give him so gratuitous a testimonial before Miss Grantham and the gentleman whom he mentally referred to as "that ass of a showman."
The front door opened, and a blast of cold wind came blustering round into the inner hall where they were sitting, making the thick tapestry portière belly and fill like a ship's sail, when the wind first catches it. The collie pricked his ears, and thumped his tail on the floor with vague welcome.
Mrs. Vivian entered, followed by Lord Chesterford. He looked absurdly healthy and happy.
"It's a perfectly beastly day," he said cheerfully, advancing to the fireplace. "Mrs. Vivian, let Dodo send you some tea up to your room. You must be wet through. Surely it is tea-time, Dodo."
"I told you so," said Dodo to Jack.
"Has Jack been saying it isn't tea-time?" asked Chesterford.
"No," said Dodo. "I only said that your virtue in going to see almshouses would find its immediate reward in an appetite for tea."
Mrs. Vivian laughed.
"You mustn't reduce our virtues to the lowest terms, as if we were two vulgar fractions."
"Do you suppose a vulgar fraction knows how vulgar it is?" asked Miss Grantham.
"Vulgar without being funny," said. Jack, with the air of helping her out of a difficulty.
"I never saw anything funny in vulgar fractions," remarked Lord Ledgers. "Chesterford and I used to look up the answers at the end of the book, and try to make them correspond with the questions."
Dodo groaned.
"Oh, Chesterford, don't tell me you're not honest either."
"What do you think about honesty, Mrs. Vivian?" asked Miss Grantham.
Mrs. Vivian considered.
"Honesty is much maligned by being called the best policy," she said; "it' isn't purely commercial. Honesty is rather fine sometimes."
"Oh, I'm sure Mrs. Vivian's honest," murmured Miss Grantham. "She thinks before, she tells you her opinion. I always give my opinion first, and think about it afterwards."
"I've been wanting to stick up for honesty all the afternoon," said Dodo to Mrs. Vivian, "only I haven't dared. Everyone has been saying that it is dull and obtrusive, and like labourers' cottages. I believe we are all a little honest, really. No one has got any right to call it the best policy. It makes you feel as if you were either a kind of life assurance, or else a thief."
Chesterford looked a trifle puzzled.
Dodo turned to him.
"Poor old man," she said, "did they call him names? Never mind. We'll go and be labelled 'Best policy. No others need apply.'"
She got up from her chair, and pulled Chesterford's moustache.
"You look so abominably healthy, Chesterford," she said. "How's Charlie getting on? Tell him if he beats his wife anymore, I shall; beat you. You wouldn't like that, you know. Will you ring for tea, dear? Mrs. Vivian, I command you to go to your room. I had your fire lit, and I'll send tea up. You're a dripping sop."
Mrs. Vivian pleaded guilty, and vanished. Sounds of music still came from the drawing-room. "It's no use telling Edith to come to tea," remarked Dodo. "She said the other day that if anyone ever proposed to her, whom she cared to marry, she will feel it only fair to tell him that the utmost she can offer him, is to play second fiddle to her music."
Edith's music was strongly exciting, and in the pause that followed, Dodo went to the door and opened it softly, and a great tangle of melody poured out and filled the hall. She was playing the last few pages of the overture to an opera that she had nearly completed. The music was gathering itself up for the finale. Note after note was caught up, as it were, to join an army of triumphant melody overhead, which grew fuller and more complete every moment, and seemed to hover, waiting for some fulfilment. Ah, that was it. Suddenly from below crashed out a great kingly motif, strong with the strength of a man who is pure and true, rising higher and higher, till it joined the triumph overhead, and moved away, strong to the end.
There was a dead silence; Dodo was standing by the door, with her lips slightly parted, feeling that there was something in this world better and bigger, perhaps, than her own little hair-splittings and small emotions. With this in her mind, she looked across to where Chesterford was standing. The movement was purely instinctive, and she could neither have accounted for it, nor was she conscious of it, but in her eyes there was the suggestion of unshed tears, and a look of questioning shame. Though a few bars of music cannot change the nature of the weakest of us, and Dodo was far from weak, she was intensely impressionable, and that moment had for her the germ of a possibility which might—who could say it could not?—have taken root in her and borne fruit. The parable of the mustard seed is as-old and as true as time. But Chesterford was not musical; he had taken a magazine from the table, and was reading about grouse disease.
Chapter Seven
Dodo was sitting in a remarkably easy-chair in her own particular room at the house in Eaton Square. As might have been expected, her room was somewhat unlike other rooms. It had a pale orange-coloured paper, with a dado of rather more intense shade of the same colour, an orange-coloured carpet and orange-coloured curtains. Dodo had no reason to be afraid of orange colour just yet. It was a room well calculated to make complete idleness most easy. The tables
