Mrs. Leveret’s sense of being adrift was intensified by the appearance of Mrs. Ballinger’s drawing-room. To a careless eye its aspect was unchanged; but those acquainted with Mrs. Ballinger’s way of arranging her books would instantly have detected the marks of recent perturbation. Mrs. Ballinger’s province, as a member of the Lunch Club, was the Book of the Day. On that, whatever it was, from a novel to a treatise on experimental psychology, she was confidently, authoritatively “up.” What became of last year’s books, or last week’s even; what she did with the “subjects” she had previously professed with equal authority; no one had ever yet discovered. Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board. It was Mrs. Ballinger’s boast that she was “abreast with the Thought of the Day,” and her pride that this advanced position should be expressed by the books on her drawing-room table. These volumes, frequently renewed, and almost always damp from the press, bore names generally unfamiliar to Mrs. Leveret, and giving her, as she furtively scanned them, a disheartening glimpse of new fields of knowledge to be breathlessly traversed in Mrs. Ballinger’s wake. But to-day a number of maturer-looking volumes were adroitly mingled with the primeurs of the press--Karl Marx jostled Professor Bergson, and the “Confessions of St. Augustine” lay beside the last work on “Mendelism”; so that even to Mrs. Leveret’s fluttered perceptions it was clear that Mrs. Ballinger didn’t in the least know what Osric Dane was likely to talk about, and had taken measures to be prepared for anything. Mrs. Leveret felt like a passenger on an ocean steamer who is told that there is no immediate danger, but that she had better put on her life-belt. It was a relief to be roused from these forebodings by Miss Van Vluyck’s arrival. “Well, my dear,” the new-comer briskly asked her hostess, “what subjects are we to discuss to-day?” Mrs. Ballinger was furtively replacing a volume of Wordsworth by a copy of Verlaine. “I hardly know,” she said somewhat nervously. “Perhaps we had better leave that to circumstances.” “Circumstances?” said Miss Van Vluyck drily. “That means, I suppose, that Laura Glyde will take the floor as usual, and we shall be deluged with literature.” Philanthropy and statistics were Miss Van Vluyck’s province, and she naturally resented any tendency to divert their guest’s attention from these topics. Mrs. Plinth at this moment appeared. “Literature?” she protested in a tone of remonstrance. “But this is perfectly unexpected. I understood we were to talk of Osric Dane’s novel.”