Either the question or the tone sent the Countess off into carillons of amusement. Everybody could see that Denry had made the Countess laugh tremendously. It was on this note that the waltz finished. She was still laughing when he bowed to her (as taught by Ruth Earp). He could not comprehend why she had so laughed, save on the supposition that he was more humorous than he had suspected. Anyhow he laughed too, and they parted laughing. He remembered that he had made a marked effect (though not one of laughter) on the tailor by quickly returning the question, "Are you?" And his unpremeditated stroke with the Countess was similar. When he had got ten yards on his way towards Harold Etches and a fiver he felt something in his hand. The Countess’s fan was sticking between his fingers. It had unhooked itself from her chain. He furtively pocketed it. VIII "Just the same as dancing with any other woman!"—he told this untruth in reply to a question from Sillitoe. It was the least he could do. And any other young man in his place would have said as much or as little. "What was she laughing at?" somebody else asked. "Ah!" said Denry judiciously, "wouldn’t you like to know?" "Here you are!" said Etches, with an unattentive, plutocratic gesture handing over a five-pound note. He was one of those men who never venture out of sight of a bank without a banknote in their pockets—"because you never know what may turn up." Denry accepted the note with a silent nod. In some directions he was gifted with astounding insight. And he could read in the faces of the haughty males surrounding him that in the space of a few minutes he had risen from nonentity into renown. He had become a great man. He did not at once realise how great, how renowned. But he saw enough in those eyes to cause his heart to glow, and to rouse in his brain those ambitious dreams which stirred him upon occasion. He left the group; he had need of motion, and also of that mental privacy which one may enjoy while strolling about on a crowded floor, in the midst of a considerable noise. He noticed that the Countess was now dancing with an Alderman, and that the Alderman, by an oversight inexcusable in an Alderman, was not wearing gloves. It was he, Denry, who had broken the ice so that the Aldermen might plunge into the water! He first had danced with the Countess, and had rendered her up to the Alderman with delicious gaiety upon her countenance. By instinct he knew Bursley, and he knew that he would be talked of. He knew that, for a time at any rate, he would displace even Jos. Curtenly, that almost professional "card" and amuser of burgesses, in the popular imagination. It would not be: "Have ye heard Jos.’s latest?" It would be: "Have ye heard about young Machin, Duncalf’s clerk?"