They did not look much at Hilda, even on the arm of her liveried priest.  She was a strange vessel, sailing in from beyond their ken, and her pilot was almost as novel, yet they were incurious.  Their interests were not in any way diffused:  they had one straight line and it led upward, pausing at the personalities clerked above them, with an ultimate point in the head of a department.  The Head of the Department was the only person unaware, when addressed, of a travelling eye in search over his shoulder of somebody with whom it would be more advantageous to converse.  Yet there were a few people apparently not altogether indifferent to the presence of Miss Howe.  She saw them here and there, and when Arnold said, “It must seem odd to you, but I know hardly anybody here.  We attempt no social duties,” she singled out this one and that, whom Alicia had asked to meet her, and mentioned them to him with a warm pleasure in implying one of the advantages of belonging to the world rather than to the cloister.  Stephen knew their names and their dignities.  He received what she said with suitably impressed eyebrow and nods of considerate assent.  Hilda carried him along, as it were, in their direction.  She was full that night of a triumphant sense of her own vitality, her success and value as a human unit.  There was that in her blood which assured her of a welcome; it had logic in it, with the basis of her rarity, her force, her distinction among other women.  She pressed forward to human fellowship with a smile on her lips, as a delightful matter of course, going toward the people who were not indifferent to the fact that she was there, who could not be entirely, since they had some sort of knowledge of her.

In no case did they ignore her, but they were so cheerfully engaged in conversation that they were usually quite oblivious of her.  She encountered this animated absorption two or three times, then, turning, she found that the absorbed ones had changed their places—­were no longer in her path.  One lady put herself at a safe distance and then bowed with much cordiality.  It was extraordinary in a group of five how many glistening backs would be presented, quite without offence, to her approach.  Mrs. Winstick had hidden behind the Superintendent of Stamps and Stationery, to whom she was explaining, between spoonfuls of strawberry ice her terrible situation.  And from the lips of another lady, whose face she knew, she heard after she had passed, “Don’t you think it’s rather an omnium gatherum?”

It was like Hilda Howe to note at that moment, with serious interest, how the little world about them had the same negative attitude for the missionary priest beside her, presenting it with a hardly perceptible difference.  Within its limits there was plainly no room for him either.  His acquaintances—­he had a few—­bowed with the kind of respect which implies distance, and in the wandering eyes of the others it was plain that he did not exist.