IN the earlier years of her loneliness, Mrs. Jerningham’s efforts in the way of little dinners were generally crowned with success. Women liked to dine at the toy-villa, because they knew the most eligible men were to be met there. Men were pleased to accept Mrs. Jerningham’s invitations, sure that at her house they would encounter none but handsome or agreeable women. She displayed a delightful tact in the selection of her society. She would invite a lovely inanity to sit at her table, as a beautiful object for the contemplation of her guests; but she would take care to balance her soulless divinity by some decent-looking woman with brains. If the Household-Brigade element threatened to preponderate, and there was reason to dread that the whole talk at dinner would be about the wonderful things “fellows” present, and other fellows absent, who were the intimate friends of those fellows, had done in the way of deer-stalking in the Trossachs, or salmon-fishing in Norway, during the last autumn, Mrs. Jerningham took care to leaven it, and would despatch an invitation to some popular littérateur or fashionable actor, some clever amateur, well up in all the art-gossip, or a gentlemanly young explorer, lately returned from Africa with the last ideas about the source of the Nile, and delightful serio-comic anecdotes about encounters with crocodiles and Abyssinian damsels. The mistress of River Lawn made her parties pleasant at any cost of trouble to herself. Even the dragon that guarded the enchanted garden, in the shape of an elderly aunt, was a pleasant dragon, who dressed well, and could talk cleverly on occasion. And then the dinners were not those shadowy repasts which are wont to be served in mansions where a lady reigns unassisted by masculine counsel. Mrs. Colton, the elderly aunt, had entertained archbishops in her day, and knew how to compose a _menu_. The wines that sparkled into brightness under the light of beauty’s eye at Mrs. Jerningham’s table were supplied by Mr. Jerningham’s own wine-merchant, who would not have dared to impose on the lady’s possible innocence.