At dinner he was careful to attempt no repetition of the display which had done very well at luncheon; it must not be thought that he had the habit of talking for effect.  Mrs. Warricombe, unless he mistook, had begun to view him more favourably; her remarks made less distinction between him and the other guests.  But he could not like his hostess; he thought her unworthy to be the mother of Sidwell and Fanny, of Buckland and Louis; there was a marked strain of the commonplace in her.  The girls, costumed for the evening, affected him with a return of the awe he had all but overcome.  Sidwell was exquisite in dark colours, her sister in white.  Miss Moorhouse (addressed by her friends as ‘Sylvia’) looked older than in the day-time, and had lost something of her animation; possibly the country routine had begun to weary her a little.

Peak was at a vast distance from the hour which saw him alight at Exeter and begin his ramble about the city.  He no longer felt himself alone in the world; impossible to revive the mood in which he deliberately planned to consume his economies in a year or two of desert wandering; far other were the anticipations which warmed his mind when the after-dinner repose attuned him to unwonted hopefulness.  This family were henceforth his friends, and it depended only upon himself to make the connection lasting, with all manner of benefits easily imagined.  Established in the country, the Warricombes stood to him in quite a different relation from any that could have arisen had he met with them in London.  There he would have been nothing more than a casual dinner-guest, welcomed for the hour and all but forgotten when he had said good-night.  For years he had understood that London offered him no prospect of social advancement.  But a night passed under this roof practically raised him to a level whence he surveyed a rich field of possible conquest.  With the genial geologist he felt himself on excellent terms, and much of this was ascribable to a singular chance which had masked his real being, and represented him, with scarce an effort of his own, in a light peculiarly attractive to Mr. Warricombe.  He was now playing the conscious hypocrite; not a pleasant thing to face and accept, but the fault was not his—­fate had brought it about.  At all events, he aimed at no vulgar profit; his one desire was for human fellowship; he sought nothing but that solace which every code of morals has deemed legitimate.  Let the society which compelled to such an expedient bear the burden of its shame.

That must indeed have been a circle of great intellects amid which Godwin Peak felt himself subordinate.  He had never known that impression, and in the Warricombe family was no one whom he could regard even as his equal.  Buckland, doubtless, had some knowledge of the world, and could boast of a free mind; but he lacked subtlety:  a psychological problem would easily puzzle him.  Mr. Warricombe’s attainments were respectable, but what could be said of a man who had devoted his life to geology, and still (in the year 1884) remained an orthodox member of the Church of England?  Godwin, as he sat in the drawing-room and enjoyed its atmosphere of refinement, sincerely held himself of far more account as an intellectual being than all the persons about him.