And for a moment she wished they had not come. Her old horror of being numbered with the great crowd of the undistinguished came upon her once more. Then she thought of the conversation in the studio, and she hardened herself in resolve. "He shall be famous. I will make him famous, whether he wishes it, cares for it, or not." Mrs. Shiffney was not standing close to the first door to "receive" solemnly. She could not "be bothered" to do that. The Heaths presently came upon her, looking very large and Roman, in the middle of the second drawing-room. In the room just beyond a small orchestra was playing. This was a sure sign of a "clearance" party. Mrs. Shiffney never had an orchestra playing alone, and steadily, through an evening unless bores and frumps were present. "Hungarians in distress" she called these uniformed musicians, "trying to help bores in distress and failing inevitably." She held out her hand to Charmian with a faintly ironic smile. "I'm so glad to see you. Ah, Mr. Heath--Benedick as the married man. I expect you are doing something wonderful as one hears nothing about you. The deep silence fills me with expectation." She smiled again, and turned to speak to an old lady with fuzzy white hair. "One of the fuzzywuzzies who go to private views, and who insist on knowing me once a year for my sins." Charmian's lips tightened as she walked slowly on. She met many people whom she knew, too many; and that evening she felt peculiarly aware of the insignificance of Claude and herself, combined as a "married couple," in the eyes of this society. What were they? Just two people with fifteen hundred a year and a little house near Kensington High Street. As an unmarried girl in Berkeley Square, with a popular mother, possibilities had floated about her. Clever, rising men came to that house. She had charm. She was "in" everything. Now she felt that a sort of fiat had been pronounced, perhaps by Adelaide Shiffney, and her following, "Charmian's dropping out." No doubt she exaggerated. She was half conscious that she was exaggerating. But there was surely a change in the attitude people adopted toward her. She attributed it to Mrs. Shiffney. "Adelaide hates Claude," she said to herself, adding a moment later the woman's reason, "because she was in love with him before he married me, and he wouldn't look at her." Such a hatred of Adelaide's would almost have pleased her, had not Adelaide unfortunately been so very influential. Claude caught sight of Mrs. Mansfield and went to join her, while Charmian spoke to Lady Mildred Burnington, and then to Max Elliot.