The Duchess flushed and stood up.

“Oh, well, that’s all right,” she said, but no longer in the same voice.  “Remember, I have your promise.  Good-bye, Julie, you darling!...  Oh, by-the-way, what an idiot I am!  Here am I forgetting the chief thing I came about.  Will you come with me to Lady Hubert to-night?  Do!  Freddie’s away, and I hate going by myself.”

“To Lady Hubert’s?” said Julie, starting a little.  “I wonder what Lady Henry would say?”

“Tell her Jacob won’t be there,” said the Duchess, laughing.  “Then she won’t make any difficulties.”

“Shall I go and ask her?”

“Gracious! let me get out of the house first.  Give her a message from me that I will come and see her to-morrow morning.  We’ve got to make it up, Freddie says; so the sooner it’s over, the better.  Say all the civil things you can to her about to-night, and wire me this afternoon.  If all’s well, I come for you at eleven.”

The Duchess rustled away.  Julie was left standing by the table, alone.  Her face was very still, but her eyes shone, her teeth pressed her lip.  Unconsciously her hand closed upon a delicate blossom of eucharis and crushed it.

“I’ll go,” she said, to herself.  “Yes, I’ll go.”

Her letter of the morning, as it happened, had included the following sentences: 

“I think to-night I must put in an appearance at the Hubert Delafields’, though I own that neither the house nor the son of the house is very much to my liking.  But I hear that he has gone back to the country.  And there are a few people who frequent Lady Hubert, who might just now be of use.”

Lady Henry gave her consent that Mademoiselle Le Breton should accompany the Duchess to Lady Hubert’s party almost with effusion.  “It will be very dull,” she said.  “My sister-in-law makes a desert and calls it society.  But if you want to go, go.  As to Evelyn Crowborough, I am engaged to my dentist to-morrow morning.”

When at night this message was reported to the Duchess, as she and Julie were on their way to Rutland Gate, she laughed.

“How much leek shall I have to swallow?  What’s to-morrow?  Wednesday.  Hm—­cards in the afternoon; in the evening I appear, sit on a stool at Lady Henry’s feet, and look at you through my glasses as though I had never seen you before.  On Thursday I leave a French book; on Friday I send the baby to see her.  Goodness, what a time it takes!” said the Duchess, raising her very white and very small shoulders.  “Well, for my life, I mustn’t fail to-morrow night.”

At Lady Hubert’s they found a very tolerable, not to say lively, gathering, which quite belied Lady Henry’s slanders.  There was not the same conscious brilliance, the same thrill in the air, as pertained to the gatherings in Bruton Street.  But there was a more solid social comfort, such as befits people untroubled by the certainty that the world is looking on.  The guests of Bruton Street laughed, as well-bred people should, at the estimation in which Lady Henry’s salon was held, by those especially who did not belong to it.  Still, the mere knowledge of this outside estimate kept up a certain tension.  At Lady Hubert’s there was no tension, and the agreeable nobodies who found their way in were not made to blush for the agreeable nothings of their conversation.