' Then why do you ever consider them?'
' Because they are not critics, and because in New York everyone reads the unreadable. This is my room—you are next door, I think.'
' I shan't come to dinner,' she said. ' I am rather tired. By the way, is that large, beautiful girl Mrs. Palmer's daughter?'
' Probably. Why?'
' Will she be at the play to-night?'
' Probably. Why?'
Mrs. Emsworth frowned.
' It is not fit,' she said.
Bilton raised his eyebrows. This was indeed a woman of ' infinite variety.'
' You cannot alter your play for fear she will be there,' he said.
' No; I suppose not. I say, what devils we are!'
The play was an enormous success, and Mrs. Emsworth's personality seemed to lift it out of the regions of the equivocal. The part, that of a woman who represented the triumph of mind over morals, fitted her like a glove, and it was as impossible to be shocked as it is when a child uses a coarse or profane expression. Her impropriety was no more improper than is the natural instinct of a bird or animal improper; by a supreme effort of nature rather than art she seemed to roll up like an undecipherable manuscript the whole moral code, and say, ' Now, let's begin again.' Her gaiety covered her sins; more than that it transformed them into something so sunlit that the shadows vanished. Even as we laugh at Fricka when she inveighs against Siegmund and Sieglinde, feeling that condemnation is impossible, because praise or blame is uncalled for and irrelevant, so the ethical question (indeed, there was no question) of whether the person whom Mrs.
