She often thought about Nittie Vandercrump screaming away in New York, and even adopted a modified version of her yells of pleasure. These she gave vent to when dull people, who for some reason mattered, told her long stupid stories, and found that they had achieved, for the first time in their lives, a brilliant and startling success. Naturally she made quantities of mistakes. Occasionally a man at her table would find in his neighbour a woman with whom he had not been on speaking terms for years, or again, she solemnly introduced Bob Crawley to the wife he had divorced a year before, and immediately afterwards to the woman concerning whom his wife might have divorced him the year before that. Nor could she at first grasp the fact that a Duchess perhaps did not matter at all, and that Mrs. Smith mattered very much, and she had to drop the Duchess and smooth down Mrs. Smith. But these were mere childish stumbles, and having picked herself up she again clung tightly with one hand to her godmother and with the other to her mascot, the Russian dancer. And all the time while she was so nimbly climbing, she and Petropopoloffski were sitting on a great egg which was to be hatched in the autumn, when London would be full again for the session. Russian ballet this year was the rage to the exclusion of all other rages, and the great egg was no less than a further six-weeks season of it, financed and engineered by Sarah. Not until when late in July the egg was, so to speak, announced, did any one, even her godmother, know that it was she who had laid it, and she who had Petropopoloffski in her pocket, and she who had taken the Duke of Kent’s theatre for it, and she who had arranged to have the dress-circle and pit taken away and rows of boxes substituted, and she, finally, who had taken thirty-seven boxes herself, so that only through her favour could anybody engage them. It was a great, a brilliant stroke, hazardous perhaps, but then everybody wanted to see Russian ballet so much that they would not stick at being indebted to her for their boxes. But it came off: within a couple of days of the subscription list being opened, all boxes not reserved by her had been let, and she began most cordially to allow applicants to have some of hers. Very wisely, she gratified no private slights by refusing them, she only made friends by granting them. She kept just two or three of the best, in case of emergencies.