Lord Bobby couldn’t remember—­had to promise to drop him a line.  Gianacchi was there, trying to treat Fillimore with coldness because the Sportsman had discovered too many virtues in his Gadfly, exalted her, indeed, into a favourite for Saturday’s hurdle race, a notability for which Gianacchi felt himself too modest.  “They say,” Fillimore had written, “that the Gadfly has been seen jumping by moonlight”—­the sort of the thing to spoil any book.  Fillimore was an acute and weary-looking little man with a peculiarly sweet smile and an air of cynicism which gave to his lightest word a dangerous and suspicious air.  It was rumoured in official circles that he had narrowly escaped beheading, for pointing out too ironically the disabilities of a Viceroy who insisted on reviewing the troops from a cushioned carriage with the horses taken out.  Fillimore seemed to think that if nature had not made such a nobleman a horseman, the Queen-Empress should not have made him Governor-General of India.  Fillimore was full of prejudices.  Gianacchi, however, found it impossible to treat him coldly.  His smoothness of temperament stood in the way.  Instead, he imparted the melodious information that the Gadfly had pecked badly twice at Tollygunge that morning, and smiled with pathetic philosophy.  “Always let ’em use their noses,” said Fillimore, and there seemed to be satire in it.  Fillimore certainly had a flair, and when Beryl Stace presently demanded of him, “What’s the dead bird going to be on Saturday, Filly?” he put it generously at her service.  Among the friends of Mr. Stanhope and his company were also several gentlemen, content, for their personal effect, with the lustre they shed upon the Stock Exchange—­gentlemen of high finance, who wrote their names at the end of directors’ reports, but never in the visitors’ book at Government House, who were little more to the Calcutta world than published receipts for so many lakhs, except when they were seen now and then driving in fleet dog-carts across the Maidan toward comfortable suburban residences where ladies were not entertained.  They were extremely, curiously devoted to business; but if they allowed themselves any amusement other than company promoting it was the theatre, of which their appreciation had sometimes an odd relation to the merits of performance.  This supper, on the part of Miss Beryl Stace and one or two other of Mr. Stanhope’s artistes, might have been considered a return of hospitality to these gentlemen, since the suburban residences stood lavishly open to the profession.

Altogether, perhaps, there were fifty people, and an eye that looked for the sentiment, the pity of things, would have distinguished at once on about half the faces, especially those of the women, the used underlined look that spoke of the continual play of muscle and forcing of feeling.  It gave them a shabbily complicated air, contrasting in a strained and sorry way even with the countenances of the brokers