Wolfstein.
"The vices are divinely comic," continued Lady Manby, looking every
moment more like a teapot. "I think it's such a mercy. Fancy what a lot
of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!"
Lady Cardington looked shocked.
"The virtues are often more comic than the vices," said Mrs. Trent, with
calm authority. "Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good farces
whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the wicked
world."
"I didn't know anyone called respectability a virtue," cried Sally
Perceval.
"Oh, all the English do in their hearts," said Mrs. Wolfstein.
"Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?"
Miss Schley was eating /sole a la Colbert/ with her eyes on her plate.
She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
"We're pretty respectable over in America, I suppose," she drawled. "Why
not? What harm does it do anyway?"
"Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is
strictly respectable life is plain sailing."
"Oh, life is never that," said Mrs. Trent, "for women."
Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
"Never, never," she said in her curious voice--a voice in which tears
seemed for ever to be lingering. "We women are always near the rocks."
"Or on them," said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands she
had divorced.
"I like a good shipwreck," exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice.
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