ladies and watching the rotation, at the piano and the harp, of three or four of his employer’s thick-fingered daughters. “You know it’s a tremendously musical house,” said one of the old ladies to another (she called it “’ouse”); but the principal impression made upon him by the performance of the Miss Crookendens was that it was wonderfully different from the Princess’s playing. He knew he was the only young man from the shop who had been invited, not counting the foreman, who was sixty years old and wore a wig which constituted in itself a kind of social position, besides being accompanied by a little, frightened, furtive wife who closed her eyes, as if in the presence of a blinding splendour, when Mrs. Crookenden spoke to her. The Poupins were not there; which, however, was not a surprise to Hyacinth, who knew that—even if they had been asked, which they were not—they had objections of principle to putting their feet _chez les bourgeois_. They were not asked because, in spite of the place Eustache had made for himself in the prosperity of the business, it had come to be known that his wife was somehow not his wife—though she was certainly no one’s else; and the evidence of this irregularity was conceived to reside vaguely in the fact that she had never been seen save in the laxity of a camisole. There had doubtless been an apprehension that if she had come to the villa she would not have come with the proper number of hooks and eyes—albeit Hyacinth, on two or three occasions, notably the night he took the pair to Mr. Vetch’s theatre, had been witness of the proportions to which she could reduce her figure when wishing to give the impression of a lawful tie.