Old Mole met Tyler Harbottle again, and, allowing for Panoukian's youthful exaggeration, had to admit the justice of his estimate. Harbottle was very like a falling leaf, blown hither and thither upon every gust of wind, dropping, skimming, spinning in the air, but all the time obeying only one impulse, the law of gravity, which sent him down to the level of the ground, the public. Seeing nothing but the public, nothing beyond it, hoping for nothing but a comfortable resting place when at last he came to earth, Harbottle was under the illusion that the winds that tossed him came from the public, and when they blew him one way he said, "I will go that way," and when they blew him another he said, "I will go this." He was a Unionist Free Trader in theory and by label: in practice he was an indefatigable wirepuller. By himself he was unimportant, but there were so many of him and his kind that he had to be placated. Old Mole met all the Harbottles. After Sir Henry Butcher's party he and Matilda were squeezed up into a higher stratum of society. Tipton Mudde took Matilda up in his monoplane and thereafter their whole existence grew wings and flew. They now met the people of whom their professional acquaintances had talked. The triumph of "Lossie Loses" continued: it was said the play would beat the record of "Our Boys." Money poured in, and almost as bewildering was the number of invitations--to vast dinner parties, to at homes, to drawing-room meetings, to boxes at the Opera, to luncheons at the luxurious hotels, to balls, to political receptions, to banquets given to celebrate honors won or to mark the end of a political campaign, or to welcome an actor-manager home from Australia. Whenever a Harbottle pulled out a plum from the pie than the subtler Harbottles buzzed like flies around it and arranged to eat and drink and make merry or at least to make speeches. For a time it was very good fun. Old Mole and Matilda did as the Harbottles did. They had so many engagements that they were compelled to buy a motorcar and to engage a chauffeur. Without it Matilda could never have found time to buy her clothes. She went to the dressmaker patronized by all the female Harbottles, but the dressmaker made for an old-fashioned duchess, who adhered to the figure of the nineties and refused to be straight-fronted. The female Harbottles fled from this horrid retrogression and made the fortune of an obscure little man in Chelsea.