Lucy was not interested in her. He was watching the lady in black who was now standing in the middle of the room. Her elbow touched the shoulder of a young man on her left. The fur tippet slipped again and lay at the young man's feet. He picked it up, and as he handed it to her he stared into her face, and sleeked his little moustache above a furtive, objectionable smile. His companion (Jane's uninteresting man), roused from communion with the spirit of Veuve Cliquot, fixed on the lady a pair of blood-shot eyes in a brutal, wine-dark face. She stood there, strangely still, it seemed to Lucy, before the pitiless stare that went up, right and left, to her appealing face. She was looking, it seemed to him, for her refuge. She moved forward. The Colonel, pinker than ever in his perfection, lowered his eyes as she approached. She paused again in her progress beside the clergyman on her right. He looked severely at her, as much as to say, "Madam, if you drop that thing in _my_ neighbourhood, I shall not attempt to pick it up." An obsequious waiter pointed out a table next to the middle-aged ladies. She shook her head at the middle-aged ladies. She turned in her course, and her eyes met Lucy's. He said something to his sister. Jane rose and changed her seat, thus clearing the way to a table that stood beside theirs, empty, secluded in the bay of the window. The lady in black came swiftly, as if to the place of her desire. The glance that expressed her gratitude went from Lucy to Jane and from Jane to Lucy, and rested on him for a moment. As the four grouped themselves at their respective tables, the lady in white, seated with her back to the window, commanded a front and side view of Jane. The lady in black sat facing Lucy. She put her elbows on the table and turned her face (her profile was remarkably pretty) to her companion. "Well," said she, "don't you want to sit here?" "Oh," said the older woman, "what does it matter where we sit?" She spoke in a small, crowing voice, the voice, Lucy said to himself, of a rather terrible person. She shivered. "Poor lamb, does it feel a draught down its little back?" The lady rose and put her fur tippet on the shivering shoulders. They shrank from her, and she drew it closer and fastened it with caressing and cajoling fingers. There was about her something impetuous and perverse, a wilful, ungovernable tenderness. Her hands had the swiftness of things moved by sweet, disastrous impulses. The white person (she was quite terrible) undid the fastening and shook her shoulders free of the fur. It slid to the floor for the third time. Lucy rose from his place, picked up the fur and restored it to its owner. The quite terrible person flushed with vexation. "You see," said the lady, "the trouble you've given that nice man." "Oh don't! he'll hear you." "If he does, he won't mind," said the lady.