willing to do anything, from the "splits" to "Hamlet," and to do it then and there; dramatists, who could have told you tales--and tried to!--of managerial incompetence which would have made your blood run cold, if they had not been so monotonously alike. These worthy folk, foredoomed to failure, were at Mrs. Lamb's in force. There were others. Birds, some of them, of the same plumage, who had achieved a more successful flight, and promised to sustain it, and perhaps fly even higher. Men and women who had won for themselves prominent places in their several callings--perhaps not quite in the front rank, but still near enough--who, having been in many such, understood what kind of house it was that they were in. It is to be feared that they regarded their hostess at best with but amusement, wondering, if she really had as much money as people said, how it was that she was willing to get so little for it. Then there were the nondescripts--that large battalion. Some actually with titles, though probably a trifle smirched. People who were the Lord alone knew who, or what they did for a living. Persons who claimed to be something in the City, and no doubt were; whose wives, if they had them, gave you the impression that their husbands were in the same line of business as the Rothschilds. There was probably no trade or profession, from the highest to the lowest, which went unrepresented that night in Connaught Square. And besides all these there were the score or so of individuals whom the hostess really knew, or thought she did. And among them moved Mrs. Lamb, as if she knew them all. Beautifully dressed, probably the best, without doubt the most expensively, dressed woman there. There were diamonds on her fingers, her wrists, on her bosom, about her neck, in her hair. If they were real, and it were blasphemy to doubt it, she would have been reduced into something worth having if she had been put up to auction as she stood. She looked, if not exactly divine, then certainly not unprepossessing. There were many present, both male and female, who thought her lovely, one of the loveliest women they had ever seen. That was just the assemblage to which such charms as hers would make their most strenuous appeal, so that, since a woman loves appreciation, in her generation she was wise.