She said, gradually gaining animation, that of course Macmaster would bring his friend. He could tell Tietjens that he should meet a very charming girl. She stopped and added suddenly: "Probably, at any rate." She said the name which Macmaster caught as "Wanstead." And possibly another girl. And Mr. Horsted, or something like it, her husband's junior curate. She said reflectively: "Yes, we might try quite a party . . ." and added, "quite noisy and gay. I hope your friend's talkative!" Macmaster said something about trouble. "Oh, it can't be too much trouble," she said. "Besides, it might do my husband good." She went on: "Mr. Duchemin is apt to brood. It's perhaps too lonely here." And added the rather astonishing words: "After all." And, driving back in the fly, Macmaster said to himself that you couldn't call Mrs. Duchemin ordinary, at least. Yet meeting her was like going into a room that you had long left and never ceased to love. It felt good. It was perhaps partly her Edinburgh-ness. Macmaster allowed himself to coin that word. There was in Edinburgh a society--he himself had never been privileged to move in it, but its annals are part of the literature of Scotland!--where the ladies are all great ladies in tall drawing-rooms; circumspect yet shrewd: still yet with a sense of the comic: frugal yet warmly hospitable. It was perhaps just Edinburgh-ness that was wanting in the drawing-rooms of his friends in London. Mrs. Cressy, the Hon. Mrs. Limoux and Mrs. Delawnay were all almost perfection in manner, in speech, in composure. But, then, they were not young, they weren't Edinburgh--and they weren't strikingly elegant! Mrs. Duchemin was all three! Her assured, tranquil manner she would retain to any age: it betokened the enigmatic soul of her sex, but, physically, she couldn't be more than thirty. That was unimportant, for she would never want to do anything in which physical youth counted. She would never, for instance, have occasion to run: she would always just "move"--floatingly! He tried to remember the details of her dress. It had certainly been dark blue--and certainly of silk: that rather coarsely-woven, exquisite material that has on its folds as of a silvery shimmer with minute knots. But very dark blue. And it contrived to be at once artistic--absolutely in the tradition! And yet well cut! Very large sleeves, of course, but still with a certain fit. She had worn an immense necklace of yellow polished amber: on the dark blue! And Mrs. Duchemin had said, over her husband's roses, that the blossoms always reminded her of little mouldings of pink cloud come down for the cooling of the earth. . . . A charming thought! Suddenly he said to himself: "What a mate for Tietjens!" And his mind added: "Why should she not become an Influence!"