It was all settled in a few minutes.  Sunday was to see her introduction to the Master’s inner circle, which met in summer, not between books and a blazing fire, but in the small college garden hidden amid the walls of Beaumont.  Sorell was to bring her.  The Master did not even go through the form of inviting either Mrs. Hooper or Miss Hooper.  In all such matters he was a chartered libertine and did what he pleased.

Then he watched her in what seemed something of a triumphal progress through the crowded hall.  He saw the looks of the girl students from the newly-organised women’s colleges—­as she passed—­a little askance and chill; he watched a Scotch metaphysical professor, with a fiery face set in a mass of flaming hair and beard, which had won him the nickname from his philosophical pupils of “the devil in a mist,” forcing an introduction to her; he saw the Vice-Chancellor graciously unbending, and man after man come up among the younger dons to ask Sorell to present them.  She received it all with a smiling and nonchalant grace, perfectly at her ease, it seemed, and ready to say the right thing to young and old.  “It’s the training they get—­the young women of her sort—­that does it,” thought the Master.  “They are in society from their babyhood.  Our poor, battered aristocracy—­the Radicals have kicked away all its natural supports, and left it dans l’air; but it can still teach manners and the art to please.  The undergraduates, however, seem shy of her.”

For although among the groups of men, who stood huddled together mostly at the back of the room, many eyes were turned upon the newcomer, no one among them approached her.  She held her court among the seniors, as no doubt, thought the Master, she had been accustomed to do from the days of her short frocks.  He envisaged the apartment in the Palazzo Barberini whereof the fame had often reached Oxford, for the Risboroughs held open house there for the English scholar and professor on his travels.  He himself had not been in Rome for fifteen years, and had never made the Risboroughs’ acquaintance in Italy.  But the kind of society which gathers round the English peer of old family who takes an apartment in Rome or Florence for the winter was quite familiar to him—­the travelling English men and women of the same class, diplomats of all nations, high ecclesiastics, a cardinal or two, the heads of the great artistic or archaeological schools, Americans, generals, senators, deputies—­with just a sprinkling of young men.  A girl of this girl’s age and rank would have many opportunities, of course, of meeting young men, in the free and fascinating life of the Roman spring, but primarily her business in her mother’s salon would have been to help her mother, to make herself agreeable to the older men, and to gather her education—­in art, literature, and politics—­as a coming woman of the world from their talk.  The Master could see her smiling on a monsignore, carrying tea to a cardinal, or listening to the Garibaldian tales of some old veteran of the Risorgimento.