During this time Baskerville had gone everywhere he thought it likely that he should meet Anne Clavering, but so far he had not been fortunate. He did not repeat his visit to Clavering’s house. He had doubted the propriety of his going in the first instance, and he doubted it still more as time passed on. But it did not keep him from falling deeper and deeper in love with the image of Anne Clavering in his mind. On the Thursday which was Constance Thorndyke’s day at home, he felt tolerably confident that Anne Clavering would be paying her dinner call; and so on the stroke of four he presented himself, armed and equipped as the law directs, at Mrs. Luttrell’s door, to accompany that redoubtable person upon a round of Thursday visits. After several perfunctory calls where Baskerville was bored to death but behaved himself beautifully, he arrived with Mrs. Luttrell at Constance Thorndyke’s door precisely at five o’clock. Constance Thorndyke received them with the same charming grace and cordiality which always distinguished her and which was powerful enough to draw within her circle, as her guest on her reception day, her husband. Thorndyke never felt so proud of his wife as when he saw her in his own drawing–room, and she collected about her, from the wide field of Washington, persons who made her drawing–room shine. He frankly admitted to Constance that hers were the only receptions in Washington which he really enjoyed. He was delighted to see Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell, the latter being to him, as to most men, an ever blooming tree of delight. He came up and established Mrs. Luttrell in a chair by the fireside, with a good cup of tea and with a man on each side of her; and Mrs. Luttrell found herself as happy as it is given to mortals to be on this distressful planet. Thorndyke’s conversation interested her on the one side, and Admiral Prendergast, a superb specimen of the old–time chivalrous naval officer, with whom Mrs. Luttrell had had an intermittent flirtation for not less than forty years, on her other side. “What a blessed comfort it is,” sighed Mrs. Luttrell to a listening group, “to be able to come into a drawing–room like this and have a good cup of tea, with some cups and saucers and tea–spoons that did not come out of a curio shop, and some honest bread and butter. I declare I am tired to death of these brazen retired tradespeople who have come to this town and undertaken to receive in their Louis Quinze drawing–rooms, and in their English dining rooms, with a great big table full of pink and green kickshaws, and candelabra three feet high all over it, and a big placque of roses just like an old–fashioned feather bed.”