Then she made her second mistake. Politics having proved a broken reed, she adopted the dangerous device of pretending to be extremely intimate with her mascot, alluding to him as ‘Bertie,’ and if the telephone bell rang excusing herself by saying that she must see what Bertie wanted. Had people believed in the intimacy of this relation, one of two things might have happened: she might either have made herself an object of interest, or (here was the danger), she might have had a fall. She had not at present climbed very high, so she would not have hurt herself fatally, but neither of these things happened. Nobody cared, any more than they cared about her having added Howard and the hyphen to her name. Thus an unprofitable spring passed, and, as a matter of fact, she was beginning to climb out along a horizontal branch. With May there came to town the noted Austrian pianist, Herr Grossesnoise. His fame had already preceded him from Vienna, and remembering that she had once seen him at Marienbad, Molly Howard-Britten wrote to him boldly and rather splendidly at the Ritz, reminding him of their meeting (he had stepped on her toe and apologized with a magnificent hat-wave), and begging him to come and dine any day next week except Thursday, which she knew was the evening of his first concert. She wrote--and here her fatal horizontality came in--on paper with a coronet and another address on the top, hoping that she might strike some streak of snobbism. She had come by this paper quite honestly, having stayed in the house and having taken a sheet or two of the paper put on the writing-table of her bedroom, obviously for the use of guests. So now she used it, crossing out the address, and substituting for it 25A Brook Street, Park Lane. A favourable answer came, addressed to the Highly Noble Lady Howard-Britten (for he prided himself on his English), on which the Highly Noble scrawled a couple of dozen notes to musical friends and acquaintances (chiefly acquaintances), asking them to dine on the forthcoming fatal Friday, which was the day after Herr Grossesnoise’s first recital, to meet the illustrious Austrian.