On this particular evening, however, in spite of several brilliant and manful efforts, Florian didn’t somehow succeed in attracting an audience quite so readily as usual. The environment was against him. On his right sat a lady whom he discovered by a side glance at the name written legibly on the napkin ring by her plate, to be the Honourable Mrs Medway, and who was so profoundly filled with a sense of the importance of her own Honourableness that she feared to contaminate herself or her daughter by conversation with her neighbours till she had satisfied her mind by sure and certain warranty that they too belonged to the Right Set in England. Pending proof to that effect, her answers to his questions were both curt and monosyllabic. This nettled Florian, who prided himself with truth on his extensive knowledge of all the “smart people.” To his left, beyond Will, on the other hand, sat a stolid-looking gentleman of nonconformist exterior and provincial garb, whose conversation, though ample, betrayed at times the inelegant idiom and accent of the Humber. Him Florian the silver-tongued carefully avoided. Opposite, was a vacant place, on either side of which sat two young girls of seventeen or thereabouts in the acutest stage of giggling inarticulateness. Florian listened, and despaired. Here was a coterie, indeed, for a brilliant talker and a man of culture! But just as they finished the soup, to his intense relief, a ray of light seemed to pierce of a sudden the gathering gloom of the dinner table. The drawing-room door opened, and through its portal a Vision of Beauty in an evening dress floated, Hellenic goddess-wise, into the _salle-à-manger_. It made its way straight to the vacant chair, nodded and smiled recognition to the bread-and-butter gigglers and the Honourable Mrs Medway, bowed demurely, continental-way, to the newly come strangers, and glided off at once, without a pause or break, into a general flow all round of graceful, easy conversation. Florian gazed, and succumbed. This was a real live woman! Ripe, but not too ripe, soft and rounded of outline, with a bewitching mouth, a row of pearly teeth, and a cheek that wore only its own natural roses, she might have impressed at first sight a less susceptible heart by far than the epicurean sage’s. As she seated herself, she drew from her pocket a little cardboard box, which she handed with a charming smile to one of the giggling inarticulates. “Those are the set you admired, I think,” she said, with unconscious grace. “I hope I’ve got the right ones. I was passing the shop on my way back from my drive, and I thought I’d just drop in and bring them back as you liked them so.”