A few weeks afterwards he received an invitation to a ball.  It was from a woman of title, the address was good, and he resolved to go.  It was to one of the Queen Anne houses with which Chelsea abounds, and as he drove towards it he noted the little windows aflame with light and colour in the blue summer night.  On the carved cramped staircases women struck him as being more than usually interesting, and the distinguished air of the company moved him with pleasurable sensations.  A thick creamy odour of white flowers gratified the nostrils; the slender backs of the girls, the shoulder-blades squeezed together by the stays, were full of delicate lines and tints.  Mike saw a tall blonde girl, slight as a reed, so blonde that she was almost an albino, her figure in green gauze swaying.  He saw a girl so brown that he thought of palms and cocoa-nuts; she passed him smiling, all her girlish soul awake in the enchantment of the dance.  He said—­

“No, I don’t want to be introduced; she’d only bore me; I know exactly all she would say.”

Studying these, he thought vaguely of dancing a quadrille, and was glad when the lady said she never danced.  With a view to astonish her, he said—­

“Since I became a student of Schopenhauer I have given up waltzing.  Now I never indulge in anything but a square.”

For a few moments his joke amused him, and he regretted that John Norton, who would understand its humour, was not there to laugh at it.  Having eaten supper he chose the deepest chair among the clustered furniture of the drawing-room, and watched in spleenic interest a woman of thirty flirting with a young man.

The panelled skirt stretched stiffly over the knees, the legs were crossed, one drawn slightly back.  The young man sat awkwardly on the edge of the sofa nursing his silk foot.  She looked at him over her fan, inclining her blonde head in assent from time to time.  The young man was delicate—­a red blonde.  The wall, laden with heavy shelves, was covered with an embossed paper of a deep gold hue.  A piece of silk, worked with rich flowers, concealed the volumes in a light bookcase.  A lamp, set on a tall brass rod, stood behind the lady, flooding her hair with yellow light, and its silk shade was nearly the same tint as the lady’s hair.  The costly furniture, the lady and her lover, the one in black and white, the other in creamy lace, the panelled skirt extended over her knees, filled the room like a picture—­an enticing but somewhat vulgar picture of modern refinement and taste.  Mike watched them curiously.

“Five years ago,” he thought, “I was young like he is; my soul thrilled as his is thrilling now.”

Then, seeing a woman whom he knew pass the door on her way to the ball-room, he asked her to come and sit with him.  He did so remembering the tentative steps they had taken in flirtation three years ago.  So by way of transition, he said—­

“The last time we met we spoke of the higher education of women, and you said that nothing sharpened the wits like promiscuous flirtation.  Enchanting that was, and it made poor Mrs.—­Mrs.—­I really can’t remember—­a lady with earnest eyes—­look so embarrassed.”