From Bordighera, from Monaco, she argued, he would certainly have written, if it were only a line of reassurance, for there his isolation was impregnable.  Only the fact that he had stayed on in London could account for the need of this second arm of silence, as well as of solitude, to enforce his complete withdrawal from the torment of tongues.

Certainly, wherever he might actually be, the girl had never realized more fully than just then what an irreparable gap estrangement from him made in her life.

There was, indeed, no pause in the stream of clever, cultivated, charming persons who rang daily at their discriminating door, who drank tea in their drawing-room, and talked felicitously for their entertainment.

It was a miscellaneous company, although the portal was difficult in a manner, and opened only on conditions of its own—­conditions, it may be said, which, to the uninitiated, to the excluded, seemed fantastic enough.

One might be anything, Lady Garnett’s constant practice seemed to enunciate, provided one was not a bore; one could represent anything—­birth or wealth, or the conspicuous absence of these qualities—­so long as one also effectively represented one’s self.  This was the somewhat democratic form which the old lady’s aristocratic tradition assumed.

It was not, then, without a certain pang of self-reproach that Mary wondered one evening—­it was at the conclusion of one of their most successful entertainments—­that a company so brilliant, so distinguished, should have left her only with a nervous headache and a distinct sense of satisfaction that the last guest had gone.

Was she, then, after all an unworthy partaker of the feast which her aunt had so long and liberally spread for her delectation?

As she sat in her own room, still in her dress of the evening, before the comfortable fire, which cast vague half-lights into the dark, spacious corners—­she had extinguished the illumination of candles which her maid had left her, a sort of unconscious tribute to the economical traditions of her youth—­she found herself considering this question and the side issues it involved very carefully.

Was it for some flaw in her nature, some lack of subtilty, or inbred stupidity, that she found the inmates of Parton Street so uninspiring, had been so little amused?

The dozen who had dined with them to-night—­how typical they might be of the rest!—­original and unlike each other as they were, each having his special distinction, his particular note, were hardly separable in her mind.  They were very cultivated, very subtile, very cynical.  Their talk, which flashed quickest around Lady Garnett, who was the readiest of them all, could not possibly have been better; it was like the rapid passes of exquisite fencers with foils.  And they all seemed to have been everywhere, to have read everything, and at the last to believe in nothing—­in themselves and their own paradoxes least of all.  There was nothing in the world which existed except that one might make of it an elegant joke.  And yet of old, the girl reflected, she had found them stimulating enough; their limitations, at least, had not seemed to her to weigh seriously against their qualities, negative though these last might be.