As it turned out on the Friday night, it was a very pretty spectacle. We were a square party of men and women about the long oak table, five down each side with our host and hostess at each end; and not one of us but was decked in the finery of _circa_ 1780, and with a great deal more care and less anachronism than is usually remarkable in such masquerades. We men silked, breeched, sheathed, ruffled, and bewigged; and the women with their laces and powdered hair looking to my mind vastly improved upon their reality. Even Iris, her tawny hair whitened to the convention and extravagantly retreating from her ears and forehead to a pinnacle (how in the world she arranged it so I could never guess!), her little, exquisite features thus quite prominently lovely, looked less wild and more worldly, as of this world and not another; altogether of a more demure elegance--an expression which, as Roger said in brazenly asking us to admire his lady's looks, became her very prettily. We were all, it must be understood, talking the speech of the period, as far as each could remember its conceits and mannerisms. Of course we all mixed things up a good deal--except Roger, who had insisted on it from our entrance, and was much more adept at the foolery of the verbiage. He was in the high good spirits that such make believe generally put him in; and was always seen in his best light as a host, as lavish of good humour as of wine, both, of course, flowing the more readily as the hour increased. And now his consistent and amusing use of his ancestor's way of speech added a great deal to the fun--in which Iris was sharing no less than I. Indeed, she has often told me since that she could have lived smoothly enough with Roger if all life were a masquerade--for Roger, it seemed, was a man who would take to fineness as a _beau geste_, where he would see you to the deuce in reality.