The house was very agreeable. That slight accident of Mr. Desmond’s perpetual presence was only an additional advantage for people who wanted to beg favours from the fashionable editor--a good word for a new book, or a new play, or a new picture. It had become an established fact, that wherever Mrs. Jerningham appeared, Laurence Desmond was to appear also. His chosen friends gathered round her, like the knightly circle about a queen in the days when there was chivalry in the land, and a queen was a sacred creature. It was he who had brought that agreeable circle to River Lawn; how could a poor lonely woman have beguiled the shining lights of the crack London clubs to illuminate her dinner-table? It was Desmond who kept a strict account of her feminine acquaintance, watchful lest the faintest shadow in the reputation of a friend should be reflected on her. The editor of the _Areopagus_ knew everything and everybody. The inner mysteries of Belgravia and Tyburnia, which outsiders discussed in solemn whispers and with awful shrugs, were stale and hackneyed facts for him. He knew that Emily Jerningham paid a certain price for his friendship--pure and chivalrous though that friendship might be--and that she must continue to pay it to the end. She had been very friendless immediately after her separation from her husband; and when the tide of public opinion was at its flood, ready to turn either way, it was Laurence’s subtle influence which had set it flowing pleasantly for her. But he knew that his friendship cost her a price, notwithstanding. There was the savour of patronage in the friendliness of the people he had won to be her intimates. Spotless dowagers visited her and received her; but they were apt to affect a sort of pitying kindness when they spoke of her to other intimates. She was “that poor Mrs. Jerningham, who is separated from her husband, you know, my dear--Harold Jerningham, a dreadful person, I believe, though very nice in society. She lives with a widowed aunt, at the sweetest place, near Hampton, and gives charming parties; highly correct and proper in every way; and, you know, I think it a kind of duty to take notice of a woman in that position, when nothing can be said to her prejudice;” and so on, and so on, with inexhaustible variations on the perpetual theme. Laurence Desmond had heard the stereotyped talk a hundred times, and the recollection of it stung him to the very quick, when he thought of it in relation to the woman whom he could remember a girl of seventeen, dressed in white, and walking by his side in a little garden at Passy.