The fact was, it was no use disguising it now, she jarred every nerve in his soul. The more he developed the more hopeless she grew. He knew now that she was very common, sordid clay. It was not in her to rise or to respond. She was crass, heavy-witted, coarse-fibered; his effort had to be made against fearful, and as it seemed with the new perceptions that were coming upon him, ever increasing odds. By this he had learned from the new and finer world into which his talent had brought him that Cora had but a thin veneer of spurious refinement after all. He knew enough now to see how hopelessly wrong she was in everything, from the heart outwards. It began to hurt him more and more to be in her company in public places. Sometimes he could hardly bear to sit at the same table with her, so alien she was from the people he was meeting now on terms approximating to equality. Edward Ambrose, realizing how the young man was striving to rise with his fortunes, was doing all that lay in his power to help him. At this time, the name of Mrs. Henry Harper had not been mentioned to him. Several times the Sailor had been at the point of revealing that sinister figure in the background of his life. More than once he had felt that it was the due of this judicious friend that he should know at least of the existence of Cora. But each time he had tried to screw his courage to the task a kind of nausea had overwhelmed him. The truth was Edward Ambrose and Cora stood at opposite poles, and whenever he tried to speak of her it became impossible to do so. Henry Harper had been present at several of the very agreeable bachelor dinner parties in Bury Street, and on each occasion his host had noted an honorable and increasing effort on the part of the neophyte to rise to the measure of his opportunity. There could be no doubt he was coming on amazingly. The rough edges were being smoothed down and he was always so simple and unaffected that it was hardly possible for liberal-minded men whom fortune had given a place in the stalls at the human comedy to refrain from liking him. "Henry," said his friend when the young man looked in one afternoon in Pall Mall, "what are you doing tomorrow week, Friday, the twenty-third?" Henry was doing nothing in particular. "Then you must come and dine with me," said Edward Ambrose. "I'll be delighted." "Wait a minute. That's not the important part. You'll have to take somebody in to dinner. And she's about the nicest girl I know, and she wants very much to meet the author of 'Dick Smith,' and I promised that she should. There will be two or three others ... Ellis and his fiancée ... I told you Ellis had just got engaged ... but we shall not be more than ten all told. Will you face it, Henry, just to oblige a friend?" A dinner party of ten with ladies was rather a facer for Mr. Henry Harper, in spite of the fact that his social laurels were clustering thicker upon him.