He stood up.  He raised all his body.  Helen raised only her eyebrows.

“Helen Rathbone!” Such was the exordium.  As an exordium, it was faultless.  But it was destined to remain a fragment.  It goes down to history as a perfect fragment, like the beginning of a pagan temple that the death of gods has rendered superfluous.

For a dog-cart stopped in front of the house at that precise second, deposited a lady of commanding mien, and dashed off again.  The lady opened James’s gate and knocked at James’s front door.  She could not be a relative of a tenant.  James was closely acquainted with all his tenants, and he had none of that calibre.  Moreover, Helen had caused a small board to be affixed to the gate:  “Tenants will please go round to the back.”

“Bless us!” he murmured, angrily.  And, by force of habit, he went and opened the door.  Then he recognised the lady.  It was Sarah Swetnam, eldest child of the large and tumultuously intellectual Swetnam family that lived in a largish house in a largish way higher up the road, and as to whose financial stability rumour always had something interesting to say.

“Is Miss Rathbone here?”

Before he could reply, there was an ecstatic cry behind him:  “Sally!” And another in front of him:  “Nell!”

In the very nick of time he slipped aside, and thus avoided the inconvenience of being crushed to pulp between two locomotives under full steam.  It appeared that they had not met for some years, Sally having been in London.  The reunion was an affecting sight, and such a sight as had never before been witnessed in James’s house.  The little room seemed to be full of fashionable women, to be all gloves, frills, hat, parasol, veil, and whirling flowers; also scent.  They kissed, through Sally’s veil first, and then she lifted the veil, and four vermilion lips clung together.  Sally was even taller than Helen, with a solid waist; and older, more brazen.  They both sat down.  Fashionable women have a manner of sitting down quite different from that of ordinary women, such as the wives of James’s tenants.  They only touch the back of the chair at the top.  They don’t loll, but they only escape lolling by dint of gracefulness.  It is an affair of curves, slants, descents, nicely calculated.  They elaborately lead your eye downwards over gradually increasing expanses, and naturally you expect to see their feet—­and you don’t see their feet.  The thing is apt to be disturbing to unhabituated beholders.

Then fashionable women always begin their conversation right off.  There are no modest or shy or decently awkward silences at the start.  They slip into a conversation as a duck into water.  In three minutes Helen had told Sarah Swetnam everything about her leaving the school, and about her establishment with her great-stepuncle.  And Sarah seemed delighted, and tapped the tiles of the floor with the tip of her sunshade, and gazed splendidly over the room.