"Tell me, Mr. Harper," said Miss Carinthia Small, with all Kensington upon her eyebrows, imperiously attacking with a stick eyeglass, which she wobbled ferociously, this very obvious young genius who didn't know how to dress properly, as soon as Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard--M.B. of the _Stylists' Review_--had allowed her, much against his will and for purely physical reasons, to get in a word. "Tell me, Mr. Harper, exactly how you feel about Dostoievsky? Where do you place him? Before Meredith and after Cuthbert Rampant, or before Cuthbert Rampant and after Thomas Hardy?" It was a dismal moment for Mr. Henry Harper. Fortunately he hesitated for a fraction of an instant, and he was saved. That infinitesimal period of time had given Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard his chance to get in again. And stung by the public acclamation of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant, a well-nourished young man in a checked cravat, who was curving gracefully over Miss Carinthia Small, he proceeded to show with some little violence, yet without loss of temper, that in any discussion of style _qua_ style, Turgenieff alone of the Russians could possibly count. "But everybody knows," breathed the defiant Miss Carinthia in the charmed ear of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant, "that had it not been for Dostoievsky, the 'Adventures of Dick Smith' could never have been written at all." The considered reply of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant was lost in the boom and the rattle of Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard's heavy artillery. Henry Harper might have sailed six years upon the high seas, but a flood of deep and perplexing waters was all around him now. Stylists to right of him, stylists to left of him, all discoursing _ex cathedra_ upon that supreme quality. Never, since the grim days of the _Margaret Carey_ had he felt a sterner need to keep cool and hold his wits about him. But with the native shrewdness that always stood to him in a crisis, he had grasped already a very important fact. It must be the task just now of the new Stevenson to sit tight and say nothing. To this resolve he kept honorably. And it was less difficult than it might have been had not Style alone been the theme of their discourse, had not this been an authentic body of its practitioners, and had not "The Adventures of Dick Smith" been acclaimed as the finest example of pure narrative seen for many a year. All through the period of tea and cake, which Mr. Henry Harper contrived to hand about with the best of them, being honestly determined not to mind his inferior clothes and absence of manner, because, after all, these things were less important than they seemed at the moment, he kept perfectly mute. Nevertheless he had one brief lapse. It was after he had drunk a cup of tea and the undefeated Miss Carinthia Small had drunk several, and Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard had retired in gallant pursuit of some watercress sandwiches, that the dauntless lady felt it to be her duty to draw him out.