“No,” replied Mrs. Shelf; “you would, if you had your own way, work ten hours a day in the City, and then come home and sleep. Once a month you would give a dinner party to City friends, and talk shop the entire evening. In the end you would die, and have written on your gravestone, ‘This was a dull, honest man, who made a million of money and no enemies.’ Now I,” said Mrs. Shelf, “should feel lonely beyond belief if I didn’t know that there were people who hated and feared me. It gives one the sense of power, and that means confidence; and a woman with confidence gets on. It is only your harmless fool who is popular all round, and a person whom everybody in their innermost hearts despise, whatever they may say of him aloud. You must shake this mood off, Hamilton. Begin now. Go up to the Latchford woman, and be impertinent to her. Say the floor’s so bad you can’t dance on it, or the supper’s poisoned you, or that there’s a woman here who picks pockets. Put it nicely, you know, and make it cut, and then she’ll ask you to her next function, because she’ll think you too dangerous to make an enemy of.” “I don’t feel equal to the job,” said Fairfax. “It would probably end in my being kicked there and then out of doors if I attempted such a thing.” “Nonsense,” said Mrs. Shelf. “Polite impertinence is the best possible _cachet_ nowadays. And you must cut out some style for yourself. Go and begin now.” She dismissed him with a tap of her fan, and beckoned another man up. Fairfax went off willingly enough, but he did not go and impress himself upon his hostess’s memory by the crude process of baiting her. Instead, he hung about the rooms and idled away his time till Amy Rivers was ready for him, and then, slipping her arm through his, led her to a niche on a secluded staircase. “Now,” she said, “tell me all about this place in Kent.” He told her soberly and quietly all the details, and waxed dry over leases and repairs of outbuildings. “It sounds lovely,” she said when he had finished; “but you don’t seem very enthusiastic over it yourself.” “That’s not my way, dear. Mrs. Shelf has been telling me what a very dull young man I am, and suggested that I should commence improving matters by going up and insulting my hostess. I’m afraid I haven’t done it. To begin with, I couldn’t; and to go on with, she’d squash me out of existence with a look, if I made the attempt. You see, Amy, I know my limitations; I’m a tolerably heavy person, with limited powers of speech, and a subdued sense of humor.” “You might be brighter, that’s a fact,” Miss Rivers admitted candidly. “If you are tired of me, dear——” Miss Rivers craned her neck down the line of the banisters, to make sure that no one was looking, and then drew Fairfax to her, and gave him a kiss.