Bulgaria, with its light and laughing crowd of critics and spectators.  Bulgaria!  The thought of that determined little nation came to him with a sharp sense of irony.  There was a people who had not thought it beneath the dignity of their manhood to learn the trade and discipline of arms.  They had their reward; torn and exhausted and debt-encumbered from their campaigns, they were masters in their own house, the Bulgarian flag flew over the Bulgarian mountains.  And Yeovil stole a glance at the crown of Charlemagne set over the Royal box.

In a capacious box immediately opposite the one set aside for royalty the Lady Shalem sat in well-considered prominence, confident that every press critic and reporter would note her presence, and that one or two of them would describe, or misdescribe, her toilet.  Already quite a considerable section of the audience knew her by name, and the frequency with which she graciously nodded towards various quarters of the house suggested the presence of a great many personal acquaintances.  She had attained to that desirable feminine altitude of purse and position when people who go about everywhere know you well by sight and have never met your dress before.

Lady Shalem was a woman of commanding presence, of that type which suggests a consciousness that the command may not necessarily be obeyed; she had observant eyes and a well-managed voice.  Her successes in life had been worked for, but they were also to some considerable extent the result of accident.  Her public history went back to the time when, in the person of her husband, Mr. Conrad Dort, she had contested two hopeless and very expensive Parliamentary elections on behalf of her party; on each occasion the declaration of the poll had shown a heavy though reduced majority on the wrong side, but she might have perpetrated an apt misquotation of the French monarch’s traditional message after the defeat of Pavia, and assured the world “all is lost save honours.”  The forthcoming Honours List had duly proclaimed the fact that Conrad Dort, Esquire, had entered Parliament by another door as Baron Shalem, of Wireskiln, in the county of Suffolk.  Success had crowned the lady’s efforts as far as the achievement of the title went, but her social ambitions seemed unlikely to make further headway.  The new Baron and his wife, their title and money notwithstanding, did not “go down” in their particular segment of county society, and in London there were other titles and incomes to compete with.  People were willing to worship the Golden Calf, but allowed themselves a choice of altars.  No one could justly say that the Shalems were either oppressively vulgar or insufferably bumptious; probably the chief reason for their lack of popularity was their intense and obvious desire to be popular.  They kept open house in such an insistently open manner that they created a social draught.  The people who accepted their invitations for the second or third time were not