The right people did come:  Mrs. Denton being a personage that a landed gentry, rendered jumpy by the perpetual explosion of new ideas under their very feet, and casting about eagerly for friends, could not afford to snub.  A kindly, simple folk, quite intelligent, some of them, as Phillips had surmised.  Mrs. Denton made no mystery of why she had invited them.  Why should all questions be left to the politicians and the journalists?  Why should not the people interested take a hand; meet and talk over these little matters with quiet voices and attentive ears, amid surroundings where the unwritten law would restrain ladies and gentlemen from addressing other ladies and gentlemen as blood-suckers or anarchists, as grinders of the faces of the poor or as oily-tongued rogues; arguments not really conducive to mutual understanding and the bridging over of differences.  The latest Russian dancer, the last new musical revue, the marvellous things that can happen at golf, the curious hands that one picks up at bridge, the eternal fox, the sacred bird!  Excellent material for nine-tenths of our conversation.  But the remaining tenth?  Would it be such excruciatingly bad form for us to be intelligent, occasionally; say, on one or two Fridays during the season?  Mrs. Denton wrapped it up tactfully; but that was her daring suggestion.

It took them aback at first.  There were people who did this sort of thing.  People of no class, who called themselves names and took up things.  But for people of social standing to talk about serious subjects—­except, perhaps, in bed to one’s wife!  It sounded so un-English.

With the elders it was sense of duty that prevailed.  That, at all events, was English.  The country must be saved.  To their sons and daughters it was the originality, the novelty that gradually appealed.  Mrs. Denton’s Fridays became a new sensation.  It came to be the chic and proper thing to appear at them in shades of mauve or purple.  A pushing little woman in Hanover Street designed the “Denton” bodice, with hanging sleeves and square-cut neck.  The younger men inclined towards a coat shaped to the waist with a roll collar.

Joan sighed.  It looked as if the word had been passed round to treat the whole thing as a joke.  Mrs. Denton took a different view.

“Nothing better could have happened,” she was of opinion.  “It means that their hearts are in it.”

The stone hall was still vibrating to the voices of the last departed guests.  Joan was seated on a footstool before the fire in front of Mrs. Denton’s chair.

“It’s the thing that gives me greatest hope,” she continued.  “The childishness of men and women.  It means that the world is still young, still teachable.”

“But they’re so slow at their lessons,” grumbled Joan.  “One repeats it and repeats it; and then, when one feels that surely now at least one has drummed it into their heads, one finds they have forgotten all that one has ever said.”