“Only the other day,” cried Mr. Cherry-Marvel, exercising, with incredible perfection of gesture, his eyes, shoulders, hands, wrist, beautiful teeth, tie-pin and handkerchief, “we were talking about you....” But it was ever one of Mr. Cherry-Marvel’s many social charms that, the instant he saw you after an absence, he would make it his business to give you the impression that people had been interested in nothing else but you during your absence. Not, of course, that he stopped there; he had other things to say, too. “Of course what I _really_ must tell you first of all, is that Henri Daverelle, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day, _à propos_ of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind, will appreciate at its full value....” Cherry-Marvel was an artist enslaved by his art: he could not see you but he and you must instantly fall under its dominion; for it was an art too perfectly modulated to admit of hurry, it was an art too sensitive to admit of interruption. Indeed, a wicked little gleam would flash across his wicked old eyes if you so much as made to interrupt him. Pitiless to himself, he was only the less pitiless to you in so far as you were not himself; and, should you be a boor and leave him suddenly, you might hear the dry, clear voice dying in the distance, but dying hard, rising and falling to the fullest and most pregnant sense of each period; for his, you understand, was an art not of selection but of detail, and must always and be continually expending itself.... “Ava Mainwaring, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day, _à propos_ of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind....”