Dinner, however, soon enabled us all to guess the model from which Mrs. Watkin had striven to copy her occasion. I was greatly relishing the conversation of my left-hand neighbor, a large-eyed, wondering-eyed woman, who said little and seemed never to have heard any of the things I usually say when dining out, and who I dare swear would have looked gratefully surprised had I confided to her my discovery that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Before we were far gone with food the attention of this tactful person was torn from me by our hostess, whose voice was heard above the other voices: "Oh, Mr. Slicer, do tell us your experience. I want _all_ our friends to hear it." Mr. Slicer, identifiable by the throat-clearing look which suffused his bleached, conservative face, was not deaf to her appeal. He had just returned from London, where he had been at the time of the Zeppelin raid, and although he had not himself been so fortunate as to see a Zeppelin, but had merely been a modest witness of the sporting fortitude with which London endured that visitation, the Zeppelin-in-chief had actually been visible to the brother of his daughter's governess. "At the noise of guns," said Mr. Slicer, "we all left the restaurant where we were dining, Mrs. Humphry Ward, George Moore, Asquith, Miss Pankhurst and I, and walked, not ran, into the street, where it was the work of a moment for me to climb a lamp-post, whence I obtained a nearer view of what was going on overhead. Nothing there but blackness." Instinctively I glanced at Mrs. Watkin, upon whose lips the passage of words like "as the proverbial ace of spades" was clearly to be seen. "Of course," Mr. Slicer went on, "I couldn't indefinitely hold my coign of vantage, which I relinquished in favor of Mrs. Humphry Ward, to whom at her laughing request George Moore and I gave a leg up. She remained there a few moments, one foot on my shoulder and one on Sir Edward Carson's--she is not a light woman--and then we helped her down, Asquith and I. When I got back to my lodgings in Half-Moon Street I found that the governess's brother, who had been lucky enough to see a Zeppelin, had gone home. I shall not soon forget my experience." This narrative was wonderful to my left-hand neighbor. It made her feel as if she had really been there and seen it all with her own eyes.