It marked, however, the feeling of the hour with him that this vision of future “bluffing” about vintages interfered not at all with the measure of his actual _malaise_. He still nervously fingered the telegram handed to him at lunch, and, when read, furtively crumpled into his pocket under Lady Jemima’s celebrated nose. It was entirely odious to him, the crude purport of the message, as well as the hideous yellow ochre of its envelope. “Confidently expect you,” the horrid thing ran, “to come and see your own play.” This Stage Society, if that was its confounded name, was indeed of a confidence! Yes, and of the last vulgarity! His conscience was not void, but, on the contrary, quite charged and brimming with remembered lapses from the ideal life of letters—it was the hair-shirt he secretly wore even in the Scratchem world under the conventional garment which the Lady Jemimas of that world teased him by calling a “boiled rag”—but the “expected,” _that_, thank goodness, he had never been guilty of. Nay, was it not his “note,” as the reviewers said, blithely and persistently to balk “expectation”? Had he not in every book of his successfully hugged his own mystery? Had not these same reviewers always missed his little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted him on the back as when they kicked him on the shins? Did a single one of them ever discover “the figure in the carpet”? How many baffled readers hadn’t written to him imploring him to divulge what _really_ happened between Milly and Densher in that last meeting at Venice? Certainly he was in no chuckling mood under the smart of the telegram, but it seemed to him that he could almost have chuckled at the thought that he beautifully didn’t know what happened in that Venetian meeting himself! And this impossible Stage Society, with that collective fatuity which seems always so much more gross than any individual sort, “confidently expected” him to come!