Getting into a corner so as to be out of the way of the people who were walking up and down the stage, she matured her plans for the cultivation of her voice, and waited patiently for her lover to finish dressing. This he took some time to do, and when he did at length come downstairs, he was of course surrounded; everybody as usual wanted to speak to him, but, gallantly offering her his arm, and bending his head, he asked in a whisper how she liked the piece, and insisted on hearing what she thought of this and that part before he replied to any one of the crowd of friends who in turn strove to attract his attention. This was very flattering, but she was nevertheless obliged to relinquish her plan of explaining to him there and then her desire to learn singing. He could not keep his mind fixed on what she was saying. Mortimer was telling a story at which everybody was screaming, and just at her elbow Dubois and Montgomery were engaged in a violent argument regarding the use of consecutive fifths. But besides these distractions there was a tall thin man who kept nudging away at Dick's elbow, begging of him to come over to his place, and saying that he would give him as good a glass of whisky as he had ever tasted. Nobody knew who the man was, but Dick thought he had met him somewhere up in the North. 'I've been about, gentlemen, in America, and in France, and I lead a bachelor life. My house is across the way, and if you'll do me the honour to come in and have a glass with me, I shall feel highly honoured. If there's one thing I do enjoy more than another, it's the conversation of intellectual men, and after the performance of to-night I don't see how I can do better than to come to you for it. But,' he continued gallantly, 'if I said just now that I was a bachelor, it is, I assure you, not because I dislike the sex. My solitary state is my misfortune, not my fault, and if these ladies will accompany you, gentlemen, need I say that I shall be charmed and honoured?' 'We'll do the honouring and the ladies will do the charming,' Mortimer said, and on these words the whole party followed the tall thin man to his house, a small affair with a porch and green blinds such as might be rented by a well-to-do commercial traveller.