Edwin stuck to it. On six more occasions he visited the Assembly Rooms, where, with exactly the same formalities, Mr. Beagle received him. With Mr. Beagle in his arms, prevented by sheer physical bulk from, in any circumstances, squeezing the figger, he revolved in the vortex of the waltz. In the Lancers he set to imaginary partners, or went “visiting” with Mr. Beagle’s hand lying gently in his, with the fingers ’alf bent. In the Pas de Quatre, where the draught of whisky and cachous was happily directed forwards, he pointed an awkward toe alongside Mr. Beagle’s tapered and elegant extremity. In the end the professor pronounced himself satisfied with him. “If I were you,” he said, “I think I should come along to my advanced class this evening and familiarise yourself with the proximity of young ladies. The fee is a purely nominal ’alf-crown.” Edwin decided to do so, and walked up in the evening with his patent leather pumps in his pocket. He felt very shy. The place was lighted with flaring gas jets, and in a room marked Gentlemen, that he had always taken for a lavatory, a number of young men, who looked like shop assistants, were putting on white kid gloves. They all seemed to know one another and to look upon Edwin as an intruder. No one spoke to him, and he waited in the cloak room until the last had disappeared before he dared to emerge. From the room on the opposite side of the passage there issued a breeze of concentrated perfumes, and a round of subdued titters. This room was labelled “Ladies.” While Edwin stood waiting and wondering if he dare risk an encounter, the door opposite opened and a bevy of bloused figures appeared. The sight of the first took him by surprise: it was the elder of the two anæmic young ladies in the drapery who travelled in the morning train with him from Halesby. She gave him a smile of recognition that revealed her defective teeth. This prospect was altogether too much for him. An acute shyness drove him back into the cloak room, and, as soon as he had taken off his pumps and put on his shoes again, he left the Queen’s Assembly Rooms and bolted down Sackville Row to his train. II The Willis’s dance, to which Edwin had looked forward with such mingled pleasure and anxiety, was destined to bring forth a violent emotional experience. Mr. Jones had not undergone the experience of cutting for the undulant figure of Sir Joseph Hingston for nothing. Apart from the fact that the sleeves were rather too long for his arms, Edwin’s dress coat was a success, and, as Aunt Laura benignantly pointed out, it was just as well that some allowance should be made for future growth. Mr. Jones had been extremely anxious that Edwin should be supplied with a magenta silk handkerchief, an ornament which, he was assured, all the best people wore stuffed in the corner of their waistcoats.