Joan was worried. “I told Dad I should only ask him for enough to make up two hundred a year,” she explained. “He’ll laugh at me for not knowing my own mind.” “But they’re so slow at their lessons,” grumbled Joan. “One repeats it and repeats it; and then, when one feels that surely now at least one has drummed it into their heads, one finds they have forgotten all that one has ever said.”!

Those drawing-rooms? Might not something of the sort be possible? Not, perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton’s great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings. The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had extinguished their torches, still capped its grim iron railings. “Give him our love,” he said. “Tell him we came together, at the end.”

She remembered, as she was taking her leave, what she had come for: which was to invite Joan to dinner on the following Friday. It was on the morning they were leaving that a telegram was put into her hands. Mrs. Phillips was ill at lodgings in Folkestone. She hoped that Joan, on her way back, would come to see her. “Are you sure it is?” he answered. “It would be so unreasonable.”