He remarked, smiling at Diana’s expressive dimple, that the mouth was difficult to catch.  He did not gaze intently.  Mr. Redworth was the genius of friendship, ‘the friend of women,’ Mrs. Warwick had said of him.  Miss Paynham discovered it, as regarded herself.  The portrait was his commission to her, kindly proposed, secretly of course, to give her occupation and the chance of winning a vogue with the face of a famous Beauty.  So many, however, were Mrs. Warwick’s visitors, and so lively the chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an amateurish hand.  Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers, Arthur Rhodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful sitter required beguiling and there was a certainty of finding her at home.  On Mrs. Warwick’s Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group.  Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal or politics, as nowhere else in Britain; all vowed it subsequently; for to the remembrance it seemed magical.  Not a breath of scandal, and yet the liveliest flow.  Lady Pennon came attended by a Mr. Alexander Hepburn, a handsome Scot, at whom Dacier shot one of his instinctive keen glances, before seeing that the hostess had mounted a transient colour.  Mr. Hepburn, in settling himself on his chair rather too briskly, contrived the next minute to break a precious bit of China standing by his elbow; and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish:  ’Oh, my dear, what a trial for you!’

‘Brittle is foredoomed,’ said Diana, unruffled.

She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers.

‘Then the Turk is a sapient custodian!’ said Westlake, vexed with her flush at the entrance of the Scot.

Diana sedately took his challenge.  ’We, Mr. Westlake, have the philosophy of ownership.’

Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake murmured over his head:  ‘As long as it is we who are the cracked.’

‘Did we not start from China?’

‘We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul.’

‘You try to elude the lesson.’

’I remember my first paedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on my cranium.’

‘The mark of the book is not a disfigurement.’

It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it.  The mark of the book, if not a disfigurement, was a characteristic of Westlake’s fashion of speech.  Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit in that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a woman.  She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her contracted circle, politeness guarding her from a riposte.

Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair.  Diana smiled and said:  ’Incidents in a drawing-room are prize-shots at Dulness.’