The young gentleman introduced to the Radnor Concert-parties by Lady Grace Halley as the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, had to bear the sins of his class.  Though he was tall, straight-featured, correct in costume, appearance, deportment, second son of a religious earl and no scandal to the parentage, he was less noticed by Nesta than the elderly and the commoners.  Her father accused her of snubbing him.  She reproduced her famous copy of the sugared acid of Mr. Dudley Sowerby’s closed mouth:  a sort of sneer in meekness, as of humility under legitimate compulsion; deploring Christianly a pride of race that stamped it for this cowled exhibition:  the wonderful mimicry was a flash thrown out by a born mistress of the art, and her mother was constrained to laugh, and so was her father; but he wilfully denied the likeness.  He charged her with encouraging Colney Durance to drag forth the sprig of nobility, in the nakedness of evicted shell-fish, on themes of the peril to England, possibly ruin, through the loss of that ruling initiative formerly possessed, in the days of our glory, by the titular nobles of the land.  Colney spoke it effectively, and the Hon. Dudley’s expressive lineaments showed print of the heaving word Alas, as when a target is penetrated, centrally.  And he was not a particularly dull fellow ’for his class and country,’ Colney admitted; adding:  ‘I hit his thought and out he came.’  One has, reluctantly with Victor Radnor, to grant, that when a man’s topmost unspoken thought is hit, he must be sharp on his guard to keep from coming out:—­we have won a right to him.

’Only, it’s too bad; it ‘s a breach of hospitality,’ Victor said, both to Nesta and to Nataly, alluding to several instances of Colney’s ironic handling of their guests, especially of this one, whom Nesta would attack, and Nataly would not defend.

They were alive at a signal to protect the others.  Miss Priscilla Graves, an eater of meat, was ridiculous in her ant’alcoholic exclusiveness and scorn:  Mr. Pempton, a drinker of wine, would laud extravagantly the more transparent purity of vegetarianism.  Dr. Peter Yatt jeered at globules:  Dr. John Cormyn mourned over human creatures treated as cattle by big doses.  The Rev. Septimus Barmby satisfactorily smoked:  Mr. Peridon traced mortal evil to that act.  Dr. Schlesien had his German views, Colney Durance his ironic, Fenellan his fanciful and free-lance.  And here was an optimist, there a pessimist; and the rank Radical, the rigid Conservative, were not wanting.  All of them were pointedly opposed, extraordinarily for so small an assembly:  absurdly, it might be thought:  but these provoked a kind warm smile, with the exclamation:  ’They are dears!’ They were the dearer for their fads and foibles.