“Yes, Roland Somerville is marvellous in the part,” she said, “and I told him he had never done a finer piece of work. But I thought Margaret had not quite grasped his conception of it. I went round, of course, to see her afterwards, and as she asked me what I thought I told her just that.” At this moment the telephone bell rang in the room adjoining, and Mrs. Withers, though continuing to analyse the play with her accustomed acumen (it had produced precisely the same effect on her as on the author of the critique in the _Daily Herald_) was a little _distraite_ in manner till her parlour-maid communicated the message. “Ah, that accounts for Hugh Chapel’s absence, who was to have sat between us,” she said to Agnes. “He was sent for to the Palace at a quarter-past one and is lunching there. And I ordered golden plovers especially for him. Hugh was at Priscilla’s last night, looking very tired, I thought. You know him, of course, Miss Lockett?” Agnes was looking a little dazed. “Not yet,” she said. “You asked me here to meet him.” Mrs. Withers made a gesture of impatience at herself. As a matter of fact she had, in asking Agnes Lockett, told her that Mr. Chapel was coming, and in asking him, had told him that Miss Lockett was coming, thus hoping to kill two lions with one lunch. “Of course! How stupid of me,” she said. “Let us instantly arrange another day when you can both be here. Ah! do come to a little party I have on Thursday night. You will find Lord Marrible here too; he only got back from America ten days ago. Poor Jack! he had a terrible voyage, and he is such a bad sailor.” A look of slight astonishment came over Agnes’s face, and remembering that she and Lord Marrible were old and intimate friends, I wondered whether she was surprised at this odd allusion to “poor Jack,” for he was known to his intimate circle as John. Personally, I had had the felicity of making him and my hostess known to each other only a few days ago, and I too wondered a little at the speedy ripening of the acquaintanceship. I did not wonder much, for I knew Mrs. Withers’s friendly disposition, and her tendency to allude to everybody by his Christian name. But at the moment a too rash act of swallowing on the part of Dickie Sebastian, who sat next me, made it my duty towards my neighbour to thump him on his fat back for fear that we should never hear his violin again, and my attention was distracted. When the fish-bone in question had been safely deposited on the edge of his plate, the telephone had again been ringing, and Mrs. Withers was retailing the reason for the absence of somebody called Humphrey, whose place I conjectured that I was now occupying.