“You know things when you love anybody,” explained the child. “You feel them. You will come again, soon?” He kissed her, promising to take care of himself.!

“I’ve always been a coward,” he continued. “I fell in love with you the first day I met you on the stairs. But I dared not tell you.” “It may have been,” he answered carelessly, “though the gulf was wider then than it is now. I’ll try and think. Perhaps it is only your fancy.”

“You mean,” she asked, “that they force themselves upon you, even if you make it plain—” The right people did come: Mrs. Denton being a personage that a landed gentry, rendered jumpy by the perpetual explosion of new ideas under their very feet, and casting about eagerly for friends, could not afford to snub. A kindly, simple folk, quite intelligent, some of them, as Phillips had surmised. Mrs. Denton made no mystery of why she had invited them. Why should all questions be left to the politicians and the journalists? Why should not the people interested take a hand; meet and talk over these little matters with quiet voices and attentive ears, amid surroundings where the unwritten law would restrain ladies and gentlemen from addressing other ladies and gentlemen as blood-suckers or anarchists, as grinders of the faces of the poor or as oily-tongued rogues; arguments not really conducive to mutual understanding and the bridging over of differences. The latest Russian dancer, the last new musical revue, the marvellous things that can happen at golf, the curious hands that one picks up at bridge, the eternal fox, the sacred bird! Excellent material for nine-tenths of our conversation. But the remaining tenth? Would it be such excruciatingly bad form for us to be intelligent, occasionally; say, on one or two Fridays during the season? Mrs. Denton wrapped it up tactfully; but that was her daring suggestion. They dined in state in the great dining-room.