Creagh’s head and body looked like two balls, one large, one little. They grew together with no perceptible join. He had so short a neck as to make a turn-down collar appear positively high, whilst his legs were as out of proportion to his body as most men’s incomes are to their desires. His plain face was withal so genial that a woman must have been prejudiced indeed to look upon it without pleasure; his words took weight from their sincerity. Each member of the little group which had gathered in the study was, in his way, a celebrity. Creagh’s invitations attracted interesting persons. As the head of one of the oldest families in Great Britain, his rank secured him from small aims, even in friendship. Unlike most men, he chose his acquaintances with more care than his dinner. Himself an ardent Roman Catholic, he took the widest pleasure in the companionship of those whose openly professed beliefs ran absolutely counter to his own. Your next-door neighbour at his table was as likely to be a Parsee as a Protestant, and his widowed sister, who kept house for him at Creagh, had once been present at a luncheon where one of the guests was a small Brixton tradesman (captured in the very act of trespassing on the estate), and the other the new British Minister at Rome. Beadon, Colonial Secretary in the late Ministry, sitting on the left of Mrs. Brand, was probably the best known man present. Comic papers made him familiar to the public; he had a clever face, which lent itself to caricature. Clean shaven and wiry, he looked rather like a dapper priest. His eyes were alert and keen; his friends said that upon one occasion only had his judgment been proved to be false. His enemies were naturally as the sands of the sea; they bit and snapped at him in the House of Commons like so many angry curs, but generally withdrew the worse for the fray. His heel of Achilles was his only child, Dora, a lady who had received more proposals than the average American heiress—partly because of her mother’s fortune, and partly because of her father’s position—and complacently believed them all to be the tribute of her personal charms. Short and squat, sallow, and of bad figure, with colourless hair, which the products of the hairdresser and the attention of a maid alone made passable, Miss Beadon was one of those extremely plain women whom men call "a good sort" for lack of a more distinctive term; a type which too often after marriage proves the exact antithesis of early promise. A woman is not necessarily amiable because she has no personal attractions. Miss Beadon was chattering just now with much animation to Lord Meavy, a new-comer, home on leave for the first time since his appointment as Governor of South Africa. Long experience had shown her the advantage of being first in the field with a possible "lion."