The guests arrived, seven in number, and they went down to the dining-room. Clytie sat between Professor Petherick, a little rosy man with a bald head and gastronomic appreciation, and a young clergyman who had taken her in to dinner. She had been for so long a time outside Church influences that a strange little Durdleham qualm come over her. He looked stern, overworked, dreadfully in earnest, she thought, not likely to sympathise with the Thelemite joyousness of life of the house whose motto was, “_Fays ce que vouldras_.” He was the only bachelor among the guests. The six others, including the professor, consisted of three married couples, middle-aged, respectable. Mr. Vansittart was a great Egyptologist. It was of his wife, a faded, weary-looking woman, that Mrs. Farquharson had so pathetically spoken with reference to the correction of proof-sheets. Mrs. Petherick was literary, fond of lions. Her talk was a catalogue raisonné of her menagerie. Mr. Farquharson listened politely and went on with his dinner. The remaining couple were the Chowders, retired Anglo-Indians, who found only late in life an opportunity of gratifying their ruling passions--on her part an undisturbed warm bath of domesticity; on his, archaeological dilettanteism. She was florid and buxom; he bronzed and shrivelled. Both talked on their pet subjects. The Rev. Victor Treherne was a keen numismatist. “A recognised authority,” Farquharson had whispered to Clytie. “Will give Petherick beans if he goes wrong.” Clytie knew nothing of numismatics. She did not know the difference between a moidur and a bezant, nor did she seek enlightenment from her neighbour. She questioned him as to his environment--North London, a large parish, chiefly poor. The conversation languished, then it brightened up through common effort. Each had a King Charles the First's head to keep in the background, feeling it to be distasteful to the other. Treherne had left his parish behind, and had brought no other interests with him save those circling round the famous aureus, a matter of supreme indifference to Clytie, who, for her part, had been cautioned to act as the superior Ki-Pi-Yu, friend of Confucius, did on certain occasions--roll her principles up and keep them in her breast. Each, too, divined dimly the other's personality, and they talked eagerly, seeking to like and interest one another through a current of mutual antipathy. The professor and Mrs. Farquharson were talking less unreservedly on the question of female disabilities. He had theories on the sacredness of woman's mission. Mrs. Farquharson's views were more materialistic. Her early training had disabused her of the oak and ivy illusion, which the professor still entertained.