’You would be offered up to the English national hangman, Jehoiachim Sneer,’ interposed Arthur Rhodes, evidently firing a gun too big for him, of premeditated charging, as his patroness perceived; but she knew him to be smarting under recent applications of the swish of Mr. Sneer, and that he rushed to support her.  She covered him by saying:  ’If he has to be encountered, he kills none but the cripple,’ wherewith the dead pause ensuing from a dose of outlandish speech in good company was bridged, though the youth heard Westlake mutter unpleasantly:  ‘Jehoiachim,’ and had to endure a stare of Dacier’s, who did not conceal his want of comprehension of the place he occupied in Mrs. Warwick’s gatherings.

‘They know nothing of us whatever!’ Lady Pennon harped on her dictum.

‘They put us in a case and profoundly study the captive creature,’ said Diana:  ‘but would any man understand this . . . ?’ She dropped her voice and drew in the heads of Lady Pennon, Lady Singleby, Lady Esquart and Miss Courtney:  ’Real woman’s nature speaks.  A maid of mine had a “follower.”  She was a good girl; I was anxious about her and asked her if she could trust him.  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” she replied, “I can; he’s quite like a female.”  I longed to see the young man, to tell him he had received the highest of eulogies.’

The ladies appreciatingly declared that such a tale was beyond the understandings of men.  Miss Paynham primmed her mouth, admitting to herself her inability to repeat such a tale; an act that she deemed not ‘quite like a lady.’  She had previously come to the conclusion that Mrs. Warwick, with all her generous qualities, was deficient in delicate sentiment—­owing perhaps to her coldness of temperament.  Like Dacier also, she failed to comprehend the patronage of Mr. Rhodes:  it led to suppositions; indefinite truly, and not calumnious at all; but a young poet, rather good-looking and well built, is not the same kind of wing-chick as a young actress, like Miss Courtney—­Mrs. Warwick’s latest shieldling:  he is hardly enrolled for the reason that was assumed to sanction Mrs. Warwick’s maid in the encouragement of her follower.  Miss Paynham sketched on, with her thoughts in her bosom:  a damsel castigatingly pursued by the idea of sex as the direct motive of every act of every person surrounding, her; deductively therefore that a certain form of the impelling passion, mild or terrible, or capricious, or it might be less pardonable, was unceasingly at work among the human couples up to decrepitude.  And she too frequently hit the fact to doubt her gift of reading into them.  Mr. Dacier was plain, and the state of young Mr. Rhodes; and the Scottish gentleman was at least a vehement admirer.  But she penetrated the breast of Mr. Thomas Redworth as well, mentally tore his mask of friendship to shreds.  He was kind indeed in commissioning her to do the portrait.  His desire for it, and his urgency to have the features exactly