"We shall be very pleased to see him," she said; "I liked him very much. He might dine with us one night, when there's nobody particular here.... I was thinking he might be useful to Cæsar. The Press can be so spiteful, can't it--so very spiteful? Of course, Cæsar will really be independent of criticism, but still----" "Still, you'll give Turquand a dinner." "Oh, you satirical villain!" she said playfully. "Hee, hee, hee! You're all alike, you writing men; you'll even lash your mamma-in-law. Aren't you going to have anything to drink? Sam, Humphrey has nothing to drink. Cynthia, a glass of wine?" The servant had entered with a salver and the tantalus, and Sam Walford proposed the toast of his son's debut. They prepared to drink it, and it was noticed then that Miss Wix sat alone in her distant corner. "Emily, aren't you going to join us?" "I beg your pardon, Emily," exclaimed Walford; "I didn't know you were with us, upon my word I didn't!" "'The poor are always with us,'" said Miss Wix, in a low and bitter voice. "If it can be spared, a drop of whisky." "Then, you'll tell Mr. Turquand we shall be happy to see him?" said Mrs. Walford to Kent. "Don't forget it. You might bring him in with you one evening. I dare say he'll be very glad of the invitation--and he can hear Cæsar sing. What's your hurry? I want to talk to Cynthia. You aren't going to write any more when you get back, I suppose?" He acknowledged that he was--that he had taken his wife to a matinée on that understanding--but it was past twelve when they left her mother's house and turned homeward through the silent suburb. The railway had just yielded back a few theatre-goers, weary and incongruous-looking. In the cold clearness of the winter night the women's long-cloaked figures and flimsy head-gear drooped dejectedly, and the men, with their dress-trousers flapping thinly as they walked, appeared already oppressed by the thought of the early breakfast to which they would be summoned in time to hurry to the station again. The prosperous residences lying back behind spruce, trim shrubberies and curves of carriage-drive finished abruptly, and then began borders in which fifty pounds was already a distinguished rental. The monotonous rows of villas, with their little hackneyed gables, and their little hackneyed gates, their painful grandiloquence of nomenclature, seemed to Kent a pathetic expression of lives which had for the most part reached the limit of their potentialities and were now passed without ambition and without hope. Some doubtless looked forward or looked back from the red brick maze, but to the majority the race was run, and this was conquest. He was about to comment on it, but the girl was unusually quiet, and the remark on his lips was not one that would have been productive of more than a monosyllabic assent in any circumstances.