The carriage stops at last. They get out and are marshalled up a crowded staircase and into yet more crowded rooms. Lady Jean Saloman receives them cordially. She looks radiant. If not a positively beautiful woman she at least is a woman who always contrives to make herself immediately noticed even amidst beauty. She is very tall; dresses superbly: wears jewels fit for an empress, and is too much a woman of the world not to know the worth of popularity. Her own birth and breeding were irreproachable, and she could be _grande dame_ to the tips of her toes when she pleased. But when the part did not suit, she varied it according to her own fancy. She was not a young woman now--that is to say, she was on the wrong side of thirty; but she was handsome and dashing-looking, and had a host of admirers, and did pretty much as she liked with her husband, who was a dark Jewish-looking man, rarely seen in her drawing-rooms, but known to have carried many wonderful speculations to a successful issue, and to have so much money that even her wildest extravagances could be indulged without fear of consequences. Lady Jean was on the very highest pinnacle of social success at present, and the novelty amused her, though the fact of being constantly _en grande tenue_ was rather a bore, and there was a dash of Bohemianism in her character, due to her Irish blood, which would have vent occasionally. The said element, however, was kept carefully out of sight of the very great and exclusive personages who received her as one of themselves. She slipped into her two characters as occasion demanded, and played them so skilfully that her respective audiences applauded each with rapture, and took each as the real thing. Those outside that magic pale of "exclusiveness" sighed enviously as they saw her leave their ranks from time to time, and soar upwards to that purer and rarer stratum of the social atmosphere which their lungs were deemed unfit to breathe. "We are quite as good as she," they would murmur discontentedly. And so they doubtless were, only they had not learnt her secret--the secret of keeping on good terms with Society, and yet indulging in a hundred little frolicsome escapades by way of variety, without offending the strait-laced prejudices and high-toned morality of the one set, or debarring herself from the questionable amusements of the other. To-night Lady Jean is very gracious, very affable, very dignified; her rooms are thronged with great personages. A list of nothing but titles will fill the pages of the _Court Journal_ that describes her "reception" to-morrow, and she feels that she is a person of much consequence. Lady Vavasour looks at her with more curiosity than she has yet evinced. Her husband's words have aroused her interest.