The next morning Victor Field left Vienna for London; but before he left he wrote a letter to Peter Wohenhoffen. In the course of it he said: “There was an Englishwoman at your ball last night with the reasoning powers of a detective in a novel. By divers processes of elimination and induction, she had formed all sorts of theories about no end of things. Among others, for instance, he was willing to bet her hali-dome that a certain Prince Louis Leczinski, who seems to have gone on the spree some years ago, and never to have come home again—she was willing to bet anything you like that Leczinski and I—moi qui vous parle—were to all intents and purposes the same. Who was she, please? Rather a tall woman, in a black domino, with grey eyes, or greyish-blue, and a nice voice.” In the answer which he received from Peter Wohenhoffen towards the end of the week, Peter said: “There were nineteen Englishwomen at my mother’s party, all of them rather tall, with nice voices, and grey or blue-grey eyes. I don’t know what colours their dominoes were. Here is a list of them.” The names that followed were names of people whom Victor Field almost certainly would never meet. The people Victor knew in London were the sort of people a little literary man might be expected to know. Most of them were respectable; some of them even deemed themselves rather smart, and patronised him right Britishly. But the nineteen names in Peter Wohenhoffen’s list (“Oh, me! Oh, my!” cried Victor) were names to make you gasp. All the same, he went a good deal to Hyde Park during the season, and watched the driving. “Which of all those haughty high-born beauties is she?” he wondered futilely. And then the season passed, and then the year; and little by little, of course, he ceased to think about her. One afternoon last May, a man, habited in accordance with the fashion of the period, stopped before a hairdresser’s shop in Knightsbridge somewhere, and, raising his hat, bowed to the three waxen ladies who simpered from the window. “Oh! It’s Mr. Field!” a voice behind him cried. “What are those cryptic rites that you’re performing? What on earth are you bowing into a hairdresser’s window for?”—a smooth, melodious voice, tinged by an inflection that was half ironical, half bewildered. “I was saluting the type of English beauty,” he answered, turning. “Fortunately, there are divergencies from it,” he added, as he met the puzzled smile of his interlocutrice; a puzzled smile indeed, but, like the voice, by no means without its touch of irony. She gave a little laugh; and then, examining the models critically, “Oh?” she questioned. “Would you call that the type? You place the type high. Their features are quite faultless, and who ever saw such complexions?” “It’s the type, all the same,” said he. “Just as the imitation marionette is the type of English breeding.” “The imitation marionette? I’m afraid I don’t follow,” she confessed.