"I--I've never been there," Arthur stammered. He was blushing very red. Here he was, up against this terrible business of the Godfrey Lisles again--and just as he had begun to get along so nicely! His confusion, nay, his distress, could not escape the Judge. "I hope I haven't made a _faux pas_, Mr. Lisle? No quarrel, or anything of that sort, I hope?" "No, sir, but I don't know them. I haven't called yet," Arthur blurted out; he seemed to himself to be always having to blurt it out. Sir Christopher's eyes twinkled, as, following the host's example, he rose from the table. "If I were you, I should. You don't know what you're missing." Upstairs Mrs. Norton Ward was better than Arthur's hopes. She showed him at once that she meant to talk to him and that she expected to like doing it. "I'm always friends with everybody in Frank's chambers," she said, as she made him sit by her. "I consider them all part of the family, and all the glory they win belongs to the family; so you must make haste and win glory, if you can, for us!" "I'm afraid I can't win glory," laughed Arthur. "At least it doesn't look like it--at the Bar." "Oh, win it anyhow--we're not particular how--law, politics, literature, what you like! Why, Milton Longworth was Frank's pupil once--for a month! He did no work and got tipsy, but he's a great poet now--well, isn't he?--and we're just as proud as if he'd become Attorney-General." "Or--well--at all events, a County Court Judge!" Arthur suggested. "So just you do it somehow, Mr. Lisle, won't you?" "I'll try," he promised, laughing. "The other day I heard of you in your glory. You sounded very splendid," he added. Then he had to tell her all about how he had heard, about Mildred Quain, and so about the rest of the circle in Regent's Park. His shyness vanished; he gave humorous little sketches of his friends. Of course she knew Sarradet's shop, and was amused at this lifting of the veil which had hidden the Sarradet private life. But being the entirely natural creature she was, talking and thinking just as one of her class naturally would, she could not help treating the Sarradets as something out of her ordinary experience, as something rather funny--perhaps also instructive--to hear about, as social phenomena to be observed and studied. Without her own volition or consciousness her mind naturally assumed this attitude and expressed it in her questions and comments; neither were cruel, neither malicious, but both were absolutely from the outside--comments and questions about a foreign country addressed to a traveller who happened to have paid a visit there; for plainly she assumed, again instinctively, that Arthur Lisle was no more a native of that country than herself. Or he might almost have been an author presenting to an alert and sympathetic reader a realistic and vivacious picture of the life of a social class not his own, be it what is called higher or lower, or just quite different.