The third stage in this declension from pleasure through caution to reassurance is induced by something so gentle, so unemphatic in the Vida Levering aspect, so much what the man thinks 'feminine,' that even the wariest male is reassured. He comes to be almost as easy before this particular type of allurement as he would be with the frankly plain 'good sort'; only there is all about him the exquisite aroma of a subtle charm which he may almost persuade himself that he alone perceives, since this softly gracious creature seems so little to insist upon it--seems, indeed, to be herself unaware of its presence. Whereupon the man conceives a new idea of his own perspicacity in detecting a thing at once so agreeable and so little advertised. He may, with a woman of this kind, go long upon the third 'tack'--may, indeed, never know it was she who gently 'shunted' him, still unenlightened, and left him side-tracked, but cherishing to the end of time the soothing conviction that he 'might an' if he would.' To the more robust order of man will come a day of awakening, when he rubs his eyes and retreats hurriedly with a sense of good faith injured--nay, of hopes positively betrayed. If she were '_that_ sort,' why not hang out some signal? It wasn't playing fair. And so without anything so crude as a sensation, but with a retinue of covert looks following in her train, she made her way to the young hostess, and was there joined by two men and a middle-aged woman, who plainly had been a beauty, and though 'gone to fat,' as the vulgar say, had yet kept her complexion. With an air of genial authority, the pink-cheeked Lady John Ulland proceeded to appropriate the new-comer in the midst of a general hum of conversation, whose key to the sensitive ear had become a little heightened since the last arrival. The women grew more insistently vivacious in proportion as the men's minds seemed to wander from matters they had discussed contentedly enough before.