“Henrietta, I don’t want to be selfish, but won’t you go on telling me stories about your Thursday party people?—­I interrupted you—­but it’s all new, you see, and it interests me so much,” Damaris rather plaintively said.

Mrs. Frayling needed no further inducement to exercise her really considerable powers of verbal delineation.  Charging her palette with lively colours, she sprang to the task—­and that with a sprightly composure and deftness of touch which went far to cloak malice and rob flippancy of offence.

Listening, Damaris brightened—­as the adroit performer intended she should—­under the gay cascade of talk.  Laughed at length, letting finer instincts of charity go by the wall, in her enjoyment of neatly turned mockeries and the sense of personal superiority they provoked.  For Henrietta’s dissection of the weaknesses of absent friends, inevitably amounted to indirect flattery of the friend for whose diversion that process of dissection was carried out.

She passed the whole troop in review.—­To begin with Miss Maud Callowgas, in permanent waiting upon her ex-semi-episcopal widowed mother—­in age a real thirty-five though nominal twenty-eight, her muddy complexion, prominent teeth and all too long back.—­Her designs, real or imagined, upon Marshall Wace.  Designs foredoomed to failure, since whatever his intentions—­Henrietta smiled wisely—­they certainly did not include Maud Callowgas’s matrimonial future in their purview.

Herbert Binning followed next—­the chaplain who served the rather staring little Anglican church at Le Vandou, a suburb of St. Augustin much patronized by the English in the winter season, and a chapel somewhere in the Bernese Oberland during the summer months.  Energetic, athletic, a great talker and squire of dames—­in all honesty and correctness, this last, well understood, for there wasn’t a word to be breathed against the good cleric’s morals.  But just a wee bit impressionable and flirtatious, as who might not very well be with such a whiney-piney wife as Mrs. Binning, always ailing; what mind she might (by stretch of charity) be supposed to possess exclusively fixed upon the chronic irregularities of her internal organs?  Recumbency was a mania with her and she had a disconcerting habit of wanting to lie down on the most inconveniently unsuitable occasions.—­To mitigate his over-flowing energies, which cried aloud for work, Mr. Binning took pupils.  He had two exceptionably nice boys with him this winter, in the interval between leaving Eton and going up to Oxford, namely, Peregrine Ditton, Lord Pamber’s younger son, and Harry Ellice, a nephew of Lady Hermione Twells.  They were very well-bred.  Their high spirits were highly infectious.  They played tennis to perfection and Harry Ellice danced quite tidily into the bargain.—­Damaris must make friends with them.  They were her contemporaries, and delightfully fresh and ingenuous.

Lady Hermione herself—­here Henrietta’s tone conveyed restraint, even comparative reverence—­who never for an instant forgot she once had reigned over some microscopic court out in the far Colonial wilderness, nor allowed you to forget it either.  Her glance half demanded your curtsy.  Still she was the “real thing” and, in that, eminently satisfactory—­genuine grande dame by right both of birth and of training.