The emptiness of those spacious rooms, during the long hours when her husband was at his offices in the City, soon became appalling; and she was glad of the lively aunts and cousins, and their following, who transformed her drawing-rooms into a parrot house, both for noise and brilliant colour, to say nothing of the aquiline beaks that prevailed among the dowagers and elderly bachelors. Once established as her relations--the distance of some of the cousinship being ignored--they came as often as Vera cared to ask them, and they brought all the people whom Vera ought to know, the poets, and novelists, and playwrights, who were all dying to know the daughter of Lancelot Davis, that delightful poet whom everybody loved and nobody envied. His fame had increased since he had gone into the ground; and his shade was now crowned with that belated fame which is the aureole of the dead. They brought the newest painting people, and the fashionable actors and actresses, English or American, as well as that useful following of "nice boys," who are as necessary in every drawing-room as occasional chairs, or tables to hold tea-cups. Instigated by the Disbrowes, and with Mario Provana's approval, Vera soon began that grand business of entertaining, to which a triple millionaire's wife should indubitably devote the greater part of her time, talent, and energy. Countesses and countess-dowagers gave their mornings to her, advising whom she should invite, and how she should entertain. They instructed her in the table of precedence as solemnly as if it had been the Church Catechism, showed her how, in some rare concatenation, a rule might be broken, as a past master of harmony might, on occasion, allow himself the use of consecutive fifths. They were never tired of extending Madame Provana's knowledge of life as it is lived in the London that is bounded on the south by Queen Anne's Gate and by Portland Place on the north. They called it opening her mind--and praised her for the intelligence with which she mastered the social problems. Her husband was pleased to see her admired and cherished, above all to see her happy; yet he could not but feel some touch of disappointment when he looked back upon those quiet afternoons in the olive woods at San Marco, and the tea-parties of three in Lady Felicia's sitting-room, and remembered how he had thought he was marrying a friendless and unappreciated girl, who would be all the world to him, and for whom he must be all the world, in a long future of wedded love. He thought he was marrying a friendless orphan, whose divine inheritance was poetry and beauty; and he found that he had married the Disbrowes.