hair, both before and behind, away from a central parting, and about the back of his still active knees there was a look of feebleness.  Seen from the front they could readily be differentiated, for the General’s whiskers broadened down his cheeks till they reached his moustaches, and there was in his face and manner a sort of formal, though discontented, effacement, as of an individualist who has all his life been part of a system, from which he has issued at last, unconscious indeed of his loss, but with a vague sense of injury.  He had never married, feeling it to be comparatively useless, owing to Horace having gained that year on him at the start, and he lived with a valet close to his club in Pall Mall.

In Lady Maiden, whom he had taken in to dinner, Worsted Skeynes entertained a good woman and a personality, whose teas to Working Men in the London season were famous.  No Working Man who had attended them had ever gone away without a wholesome respect for his hostess.  She was indeed a woman who permitted no liberties to be taken with her in any walk of life.  The daughter of a Rural Dean, she appeared at her best when seated, having rather short legs.  Her face was well-coloured, her mouth, firm and rather wide, her nose well-shaped, her hair dark.  She spoke in a decided voice, and did not mince her words.  It was to her that her husband, Sir James, owed his reactionary principles on the subject of woman.

Round the corner at the end of the table the Hon. Geoffrey Winlow was telling his hostess of the Balkan Provinces, from a tour in which he had just returned.  His face, of the Norman type, with regular, handsome features, had a leisurely and capable expression.  His manner was easy and pleasant; only at times it became apparent that his ideas were in perfect order, so that he would naturally not care to be corrected.  His father, Lord Montrossor, whose seat was at Coldingham six miles away, would ultimately yield to him his place in the House of Lords.

And next him sat Mrs. Pendyce.  A portrait of this lady hung over the sideboard at the end of the room, and though it had been painted by a fashionable painter, it had caught a gleam of that “something” still in her face these twenty years later.  She was not young, her dark hair was going grey; but she was not old, for she had been married at nineteen and was still only fifty-two.  Her face was rather long and very pale, and her eyebrows arched and dark and always slightly raised.  Her eyes were dark grey, sometimes almost black, for the pupils dilated when she was moved; her lips were the least thing parted, and the expression of those lips and eyes was of a rather touching gentleness, of a rather touching expectancy.  And yet all this was not the “something”; that was rather the outward sign of an inborn sense that she had no need to ask for things, of an instinctive faith that she already had them.  By that “something,” and by her long, transparent hands, men could tell that she had been a Totteridge.  And her voice, which was rather slow, with a little, not unpleasant, trick of speech, and her eyelids by second nature just a trifle lowered, confirmed this impression.  Over her bosom, which hid the heart of a lady, rose and fell a piece of wonderful old lace.