‘Pretty well.  Copious letters when you did write.’

’I was shy.  I knew I should be writing, to Emmy and another, and only when I came to the flow could I forget him.  He is very finely built; and I dare say he has a head.  I read of his deeds in India and quivered.  But he was just a bit in the way.  Men are the barriers to perfect naturalness, at least, with girls, I think.  You wrote to me in the same tone as ever, and at first I had a struggle to reply.  And I, who have such pride in being always myself!’

Two staring semi-circles had formed, one to front the Hero; the other the Beauty.  These half moons imperceptibly dissolved to replenish, and became a fixed obstruction.

‘Yes, they look,’ Diana made answer to Lady Dunstane’s comment on the curious impertinence.  She was getting used to it, and her friend had a gratification in seeing how little this affected her perfect naturalness.

‘You are often in the world—­dinners, dances?’ she said.

‘People are kind.’

‘Any proposals?’

‘Nibbles.’

‘Quite heart-free?’

‘Absolutely.’

Diana’s unshadowed bright face defied all menace of an eclipse.

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. . . .