“Not a member, sir,” says the General, with a well-pleased smile at the invitation; “cross-questioned by the waiter, kicked out by the committee--what?--only belong to ‘The Chelsea and Noodles’--don’t approve of clubs in the abstract--all very well whilst one’s a bachelor--eh? D----d selfish and all that--wife moping in a two-storied house at Bayswater--husband swaggering in a Louis Quatorze drawing-room in Pall Mall. Can’t dine at home to-day, my love; where’s the latch-key? Promised to have a mutton-chop at the club with an old brother-officer. Wife dines on chicken broth with her children, and has a poached egg at her tea. Husband begins with oysters and ends with a pint of claret, by himself too--we all know who the old brother-officer is--lives in the Edgeware Road!--how d’ye mean?” Lacquers goes off with a horse-laugh; he enjoys the joke amazingly; it is just suited to his comprehension. “Then we’ll meet in an hour from now,” says he, as the crowd, surging in, breaks up their little conclave; “should like to show you our pictures--aw--fond of high art, you know--and our staircase, Arabian, you know, with the ornaments quite Mosaic. _A-diavolo!_” And pleased with what he believes to be his real Spanish farewell, our dandy-linguist elbows his way up to Lady Ormolu, and gladdens that panting peeress with the pearls and rubies of his intellectual conversation. All this time Blanche is nearing the ordeal. If she thought the crowd too dense before, what would she not give now to bury herself in its sheltering ranks? An ample duchess is before her with a red-haired daughter, but everywhere around her there is room to breathe, and walk, and _to be seen_. Through an open door she catches a glimpse of the Presence and the stately circle before whom she must pass. Good-natured royalties, of both sexes, stand smiling and bowing, and striving to put frightened subjects at their ease, and carrying their kind hearts on their handsome open countenances; but they are all whirling round and round to Blanche, and she cannot tell uniforms from satin gowns, epaulettes from ostrich plumes, old from young. It strikes her that there is something ridiculous in the way that a central figure performs its backward movement, and the horrid conviction comes upon her that she will have to go through the same ceremony before all those royal eyes, and think of her train, her feathers, her curtsey, and her escape, all at one and the same agonising moment. A foreign diplomatist makes a complimentary remark in French, addressed to his neighbour, a tall, soldier-like German with nankeen moustaches. The German unbends for an instant that frigid air of military reserve which has of late years usurped the place of what we used to consider foreign volubility and politeness--he stoops to reply in a whisper, but soon recovers himself, stiffer and straighter than before.