The block of sturdy gazers began to melt.  The General had dispersed his group of satellites by a movement with the Mayoress on his arm, construed as the signal for procession to the supper-table.

CHAPTER III

THE INTERIOR OF MR. REDWORTH, AND THE EXTERIOR OF MR. SULLIVAN SMITH

’It may be as well to take Mr. Redworth’s arm; you will escape the crush for you,’ said Lady Dunstane to Diana.  ’I don’t sup.  Yes! go!  You must eat, and he is handiest to conduct you.’

Diana thought of her chaperon and the lateness of the hour.  She murmured, to soften her conscience, ‘Poor Mrs. Pettigrew!’

And once more Mr. Redworth, outwardly imperturbable, was in the maelstrom of a happiness resembling tempest.  He talked, and knew not what he uttered.  To give this matchless girl the best to eat and drink was his business, and he performed it.  Oddly, for a man who had no loaded design, marshalling the troops in his active and capacious cranium, he fell upon calculations of his income, present and prospective, while she sat at the table and he stood behind her.  Others were wrangling for places, chairs, plates, glasses, game-pie, champagne:  she had them; the lady under his charge to a certainty would have them; so far good; and he had seven hundred pounds per annum—­seven hundred and fifty, in a favourable aspect, at a stretch . . . .

’Yes, the pleasantest thing to me after working all day is an opera of Carini’s,’ she said, in full accord with her taste, ’and Tellio for tenor, certainly.’

—­A fair enough sum for a bachelor:  four hundred personal income, and a prospect of higher dividends to increase it; three hundred odd from his office, and no immediate prospects of an increase there; no one died there, no elderly martyr for the advancement of his juniors could be persuaded to die; they were too tough to think of retiring.  Say, seven hundred and fifty . . . . eight hundred, if the commerce of the country fortified the Bank his property was embarked in; or eight-fifty or nine ten. . . .

‘I could call him my poet also,’ Mr. Redworth agreed with her taste in poets.  ’His letters are among the best ever written—­or ever published:  the raciest English I know.  Frank, straight out:  capital descriptions.  The best English letter-writers are as good as the French—­

You don’t think so?—­in their way, of course.  I dare’ say we don’t sufficiently cultivate the art.  We require the supple tongue a closer intercourse of society gives.’

—­Eight or ten hundred.  Comfortable enough for a man in chambers.  To dream of entering as a householder on that sum, in these days, would be stark nonsense:  and a man two removes from a baronetcy has no right to set his reckoning on deaths:—­if he does, he becomes a sort of meditative assassin.  But what were the Fates about when they planted a man of the ability of Tom Redworth in a Government office!  Clearly they intended him to remain a bachelor for life.  And they sent him over to Ireland on inspection duty for a month to have sight of an Irish Beauty . . . .