e had fairly set in. Arabella
glanced nervously round for Mr. Pericles, who looked at his watch and
spread the fingers of one hand open thrice--an act that telegraphed
fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes an opera troupe, with three famous
chiefs and a renowned prima-donna were to arrive. The fact was known
solely to Arabella and Mr. Pericles. It was the Surprise of the evening.
But within fifteen minutes, what might not happen, with heads going at
champagne-pace?

Arabella proposed to Freshfield to rise. "Don't the ladies go first?" the
wit turned sensualist stammered; and incurred that worse than frown, a
cold look of half-comprehension, which reduces indefinitely the
proportions of the object gazed at. There were probably a dozen very
young men in the room waiting to rise with their partners at a signal for
dancing; and these could not be calculated upon to take an initiative, or
follow one--as ladies, poor slaves! will do when the electric hostess
rustles. The men present were non-conductors. Arabella knew that she
could carry off the women, but such a proceeding would leave her father
at the mercy of the wine; and, moreover, the probability was that Mrs.
Chump would remain by him, and, sole in a company of males, explode her
sex with ridicule, Brookfield in the bargain. So Arabella, under a
prophetic sense of evil, waited; and this came of it. Mr. Pole patted
Mrs. Chump's hand publicly. In spite of the steady hum of small-talk--in
spite of Freshfield Sumner's circulation of a crisp anecdote--in spite of
Lady Gosstre's kind effort to stop him by engaging him in conversation,
Mr. Pole forced on for a speech. He said that he had not been the thing
lately. It might be his legs, as his dear friend Martha, on his right,
insisted; but he had felt it in his head, though as strong as any man
present.

"Harrk at 'm!" cried Mrs. Chump, letting her eyes roll fondly away from
him into her glass.

"Business, my lady!" Mr. Pole resumed. "Ah, you don't know what that is.
We've got to work hard to keep our heads up equal with you. We don't swim
with corks. And my old friend, Ralph Tinley--he sells iron, and has got a
mine. That's simple. But, my God, ma'am, when a man has his eye on the
Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic, and the Baltic, and the Black Sea, and
half-a-dozen colonies at once, he--you--"

"Well, it's a precious big eye he's got, Pole," Mrs. Chump came to his
relief.

"--he don't know whether he's a ruined dog, or a m