He stood transfixed--overwhelmed by surprise. The room was full of people. There was Mrs. Fairfax Torrington, liveliest and most essentially modern of well-preserved widows, always _dans le mouvement_, as she said of herself; and there, lolling against the high oak chimney-piece, with an air of fatuous delight in his own attractiveness, was that Baron de Cazalet--pseudo artist, poet, and _littérateur_, who, five seasons ago, had been an object of undisguised detestation with Christabel. He, too, was essentially in the movement--æsthetic, cynical, agnostic, thought-reading, spiritualistic--always blowing the last fashionable bubble, and making his bubbles bigger and brighter than other people's--a man who prided himself upon his "intensity" in every pursuit--from love-making to gourmandize. There, again, marked out from the rest by a thoroughly prosaic air, which, in these days of artistic sensationalism is in itself a distinction--pale, placid, taking his ease in a low basket chair, with his languid hand on Randie's black muzzle--sat Mr. FitzJesse, the journalist, proprietor and editor of _The Sling_, a fashionable weekly--the man who was always smiting the Goliahs of pretence and dishonesty with a pen that was sharper than any stone that ever David slung against the foe. He was such an amiable-looking man--had such a power of obliterating every token of intellectual force and fire from the calm surface of his countenance, that people, seeing him for the first time, were apt to stare at him in blank wonder at his innocent aspect. Was this the wielder of that scathing pen--was this the man who wrote not with ink but with aqua fortis? Even his placid matter-of-fact speech was, at first, a little disappointing. It was only by gentlest degrees that the iron hand of satire made itself felt under the velvet glove of conventional good manners. Leonard had met Mr. FitzJesse in London, at the clubs and elsewhere, and had felt that vague awe which the provincial feels for the embodied spirit of metropolitan intellect in the shape of a famous journalist. It was needful to be civil to such men, in order to be let down gently in their papers. One never knew when some rash unpremeditated act might furnish matter for a paragraph which would mean social annihilation.