“Do you go to places that people are ashamed of? Is it one of your political clubs, as you call them, where that dirty young man from Camberwell, Mr. Monument (what do you call him?), fills your head with ideas that’ll bring you to no good? I’m sure your friend over there doesn’t look as if he’d be on your side.” Hyacinth had indulged in this reflexion himself; but the only answer he made to Millicent was: “Well then, perhaps he’ll be on yours!” “Laws, I hope _she_ ain’t one of the aristocracy!” Millicent exclaimed with apparent irrelevance; and following the direction of her eyes Hyacinth saw that the chair his mysterious acquaintance had quitted in the stage-box was now occupied by a lady hitherto invisible—not the one who had given them a glimpse of her shoulder and bare arm. This was an ancient personage muffled in a voluminous and crumpled white shawl—a stout, odd, foreign-looking woman with a fair, nodding, wiggy head. She had a placid, patient air and a round wrinkled face in which, however, a pair of small bright eyes moved quickly enough. Her rather soiled white gloves were too large for her, and round her head, horizontally arranged as if to keep her wig in its place, she wore a narrow band of tinsel decorated in the middle of the forehead by a jewel which the rest of her appearance would lead the spectator to suppose false. “Is the old woman his mother? Where did she dig up her clothes? They look as if she had hired them for the evening. Does _she_ come to your wonderful club too? I daresay she cuts it fine, don’t she?” Millicent went on; and when Hyacinth suggested sportively that the old lady might be not the gentleman’s mother but his wife or his fancy of the moment she declared that in that case, were he to come to see them, she shouldn’t fear for herself. No wonder he wanted to get out of _that_ box! The party in the wig—and what a wig!—was sitting there on purpose to look at them, but she couldn’t say she was particularly honoured by the notice of such an old guy. Hyacinth pretended he quite liked her appearance and admired in her a charm of her own; he offered to bet another paper of peppermints that if they could find out she would be some tremendous old dowager, some one with a handle to her name. To this Millicent replied with an air of experience that she had never thought the greatest beauty was in the upper class; and her companion could see she was covertly looking over her shoulder to watch for his strange clubmate and that she would be disappointed if he didn’t come. This idea didn’t make Hyacinth jealous, for his mind was occupied with another side of the business; and if he offered sportive suggestions it was because he was really excited, was dazzled, by an incident of which the reader will have failed as yet to perceive the larger relations. What moved him was not the pleasure of being patronised by a rich man; it was simply the prospect of new experience—a sensation