He did not often look at his wife's visiting list, being content to give her the names of the men who were to be asked to her dinners, taking it for granted that they would be asked. Every evening party was more or less an _omnium gatherum_; and about these he asked no questions--but more than once, between March and June, he had suggested that Mrs. Bellenden should be invited to dinner--to some smallish semi-literary and artistic dinner--and this suggestion being ignored, he had advised her being included in one of the big dinner-parties, where the mighty ones had been bidden to meet the royal Princess. "I don't think that would do," Vera answered coldly. "You forget that Mrs. Bellenden is one of the handsomest women in London," Claude answered with some touch of temper, "and that people like to meet a well-known beauty." "I'm afraid Mrs. Bellenden is rather too well known. You had better give a dinner at 'Claridge's' or the 'Ritz,' Claude, and let Susan do hostess for you. Susie would enjoy it." "I suppose it will come to that," said Claude. "I'll take one of your Wagner nights--when I know you'll be happy." * * * * * Lady Susan having warned her friend against the siren, was not so disloyal as to play hostess at a Bohemian dinner. "No, Claude," she said when the idea was mooted. "I have never been prudish, but I draw the line at Mrs. Bellenden." Her cousin shrugged his shoulders, and left the room with a snatch of a French _chanson_, which was his most forcible expression of temper. The light tenor voice, the gay French verse, harmonised with the nature in which there were no depths. Goodwood was once more imminent, and Cowes was in the near future, when Vera sent out cards for her last evening party, which would be one of the last of the season, on the eve of the exodus of smart London. The Princess Hermione was to be at the party--and this royal lady was like that more famous heroine of the nursery, who rode her white horse to Banbury Cross in a musical ride; for, like that famous lady, the Princess expected to have music wherever she went, music, and of the best, for the royal Hermione was a connoisseur, and herself no mean performer on the violoncello. A famous baritone and an equally famous mezzo-soprano were to sing during the evening, in the inner drawing-room, not in a formal way with programmes and rout seats, for people to be packed in rows, to sit there from start to finish till, in our elegant twentieth-century English, they were "fed up" with squalling. Everything was to be informal; and the people who did not want music would have space enough in the larger rooms and on the staircase to babble and to flirt as they chose; while that inner drawing-room would be, as it were, a sanctuary for the elect, a temple of the god of harmony.