‘All right,’ said Lena, ‘I’ll get my brother-in-law to let me have them addressed to his office, and he can telephone the result of the plebiscite direct to you.’

‘Thank you ever so much,’ said Lady Prowche gratefully, ‘and be sure to get the cards sent off as soon as possible.’

On the following Tuesday the voice of an office clerk, speaking through the telephone, informed Lady Prowche that the postcard poll showed unanimous hostility to experiments on living animals.

Lady Prowche thanked the office clerk, and in a louder and more fervent voice she thanked Heaven. The two invitations, already sealed and addressed, were immediately dispatched; in due course they were both accepted. The house party of the halcyon hours, as the prospective hostess called it, was auspiciously launched.

Lena Luddleford was not included among the guests, having previously committed herself to another invitation. At the opening day of a cricket festival, however, she ran across Lady Prowche, who had motored over from the other side of the country. She wore the air of one who is not interested in cricket and not particularly interested in life. She shook hands limply with Lena, and remarked that it was a beastly day.

‘The party, how has it gone off?’ asked Lena quickly.

‘Don’t speak of it!’ was the tragical answer; ‘why do I always have such rotten luck?’

‘But what has happened?’

‘It has been awful. Hyænas could not have behaved with greater savagery. Sir Richard said so, and he has been in countries where hyænas live, so he ought to know. They actually came to blows!’

‘Blows?’

‘Blows and curses. It really might have been a scene from one of Hogarth’s pictures. I never felt so humiliated in my life. What the servants must have thought!’

‘But who were the offenders?’

‘Oh, naturally the very two that we took all the trouble about.’

‘I thought they agreed on every subject that one could violently disagree about—religion, politics, vivisection, the Derby decision, the Falconer Report; what else was there left to quarrel about?’

‘My dear, we were fools not to have thought of it. One of them was Pro-Greek and the other Pro-Bulgar.’