change their appearance slightly, and behave in the way inadequately apprehended people do behave on these occasions. Marjorie very speedily found her disposition to take a detached and amused view of the entertainment in conflict with more urgent demands. From the outset Mr. Magnet loomed upon her--he loomed nearer and nearer. He turned his eye upon her as she came up to the wealthy expanse of Lady Petchworth's presence, like some sort of obsolescent iron-clad turning a dull-grey, respectful, loving searchlight upon a fugitive torpedo boat, and thereafter he seemed to her to be looking at her without intermission, relentlessly, and urging himself towards her. She wished he wouldn't. She hadn't at all thought he would on this occasion. At first she relied upon her natural powers of evasion, and the presence of a large company. Then gradually it became apparent that Lady Petchworth and her mother, yes--and the party generally, and the gardens and the weather and the stars in their courses were of a mind to co-operate in giving opportunity for Mr. Magnet's unmistakable intentions. And Marjorie with that instability of her sex which has been a theme for masculine humour in all ages, suddenly and with an extraordinary violence didn't want to make up her mind about Mr. Magnet. She didn't want to accept him; and as distinctly she didn't want to refuse him. She didn't even want to be thought about as making up her mind about him--which was, so to speak, an enlargement of her previous indisposition. She didn't even want to seem to avoid him, or to be thinking about him, or aware of his existence. After the greeting of Lady Petchworth she had succeeded very clumsily in not seeing Mr. Magnet, and had addressed herself to Mr. Wintersloan, who was standing a little apart, looking under his hand, with one eye shut, at the view between the tree stems towards Buryhamstreet. He told her that he thought he had found something "pooty" that hadn't been done, and she did her best to share his artistic interests with a vivid sense of Mr. Magnet's tentative incessant approach behind her. He joined them, and she made a desperate attempt to entangle Mr. Wintersloan in a three-cornered talk in vain. He turned away at the first possible opportunity, and left her to an embarrassed and eloquently silent _tête-à-tête_. Mr. Magnet's professional wit had deserted him. "It's nice to see you again," he said after an immense interval. "Shall we go and look at the aviary?" "I hate to see birds in cages," said Marjorie, "and it's frightfully jolly just here. Do you think Mr. Wintersloan will paint this? He does paint, doesn't he?" "I know him best in black and white," said Mr. Magnet. Marjorie embarked on entirely insincere praises of Mr. Wintersloan's manner and personal effect; Magnet replied tepidly, with an air of reserving himself to grapple with the first conversational opportunity.