Promptly upon his return to town, he had despatched letters to the various more stately houses where he and Pauline were to have dined--letters excusing himself and his wife on account of the extreme indisposition of his wife’s mother. He dreaded, in fact, to go to a dinner alone; he was always afraid of being taken ill between the soup and the fish; he suffered from an unutterable shyness; he was intolerably afraid of “making an ass of himself.” He felt safe, however, as long as Pauline had her eyes on him. But the Phyllis Trevors’ dinners were much more like what he called “a rag.” If he felt an uncontrollable impulse to do something absurd--to balance, for instance, a full glass on the top of his head or to flip drops of wine at his neighbour’s bare shoulders--nobody would be seriously perturbed. It was not necessary to do either of these things, but you might if you wanted to; and all the Phyllis Trevors’ women could be trusted either to put up the conversation for you, or--which was quite as good--to flirt prodigiously with their neighbours on the other side. The turning-point of his deliberations, which lasted exactly three-quarters of an hour, the actual impulse which sent him out of the room to the telephone in the hall, came from the remembrance that Pauline had made him promise not to be an irrational idiot. He had promised to go out to some dinners, and it was only dinners of the Phyllis Trevors’ sort that he could bring himself to face. So that, having telephoned his acceptance to Mrs. Trevor, who called him the Great Chief Long-in-the-fork, and wanted to know why his voice sounded like an undertaker’s mute, a comparative tranquillity reigned in Dudley Leicester’s soul. This tranquillity was only ended when at the dinner-table he had at his side red-lipped, deep-voiced, black-haired, large, warm, scented, and utterly uncontrollable Etta Stackpole. She had three dark red roses in her hair. V ETTA STACKPOLE--now Lady Hudson--had been Dudley Leicester’s first and very ardent passion. She was very much his age, and, commencing in a boy-and-girl affair, the engagement had lasted many years. She was the only daughter of the Stackpoles of Cove Place, and she had all the wilfulness of an only daughter, and all the desperate acquisitiveness of the Elizabethan freebooters from whom she was descended. Robert Grimshaw said once that her life was a series of cutting-out expeditions; her maids used to declare that they certainly could not trust their young men in the hall if Miss Etta was likely to come down the stairs. It was perhaps her utter disrespect for the dictates of class that made Dudley Leicester finally and quite suddenly break off from her.