So ended the dinner. And, as Lady Cecilia passed the general in going out of the room, she looked her contrition, her acknowledgment that he was perfectly right in his prophecy that it would never do. CHAPTER IX. It was rather worse when the ladies were by themselves. Some of the party were personally strangers to Lady Davenant; all had heard of her sufficiently; most had formed a formidable and false opinion of her. Helen was quite astonished at the awe her ladyship inspired in strangers. Lady Davenant’s appearance and manner at this moment were not, indeed, calculated to dispel this dread. She was unusually distant and haughty, from a mistaken sort of moral pride. Aware that some of the persons now before her had, in various ways, by their own or their husbands’ means, power to serve or to injure Lord Davenant, she disdained to propitiate them by the slightest condescension. But how any persons in England--in London--could be strangers to Lady Davenant, was to a foreign lady who was present, matter of inexpressible surprise. She could not understand how the wives of persons high in political life, some of opposite, but some of the same parties, should often be personally strangers to each other. Foreigners are, on first coming to England, apt to imagine that all who act together in public life must be of the same private society; while, on the contrary, it often happens that the ladies especially of the same party are in different grades of fashion--moving in different orbits. The number of different circles and orbits in London is, indeed, astonishing to strangers, and the manner in which, though touching at tangents, these keep each their own path, attracted and repelled, or mutually influential, is to those who have not seen and studied the planisphere, absolutely incomprehensible. And, as she pondered on this difficulty, the ambassadress, all foreigner as she was, and all unused to silence, spoke not, and no one spoke: and nought was heard but the cup on the saucer, or the spoon in the cup, or the buzzing of a fly in the window.