opportunity to
meet Elise Durwent under circumstances which should either cement their
friendship or else demonstrate its utter impracticability.

He listened to the chat of men who did the same things all the year
round with the same people, and he wondered a little at their
persistency in conversing at all. They rarely disagreed on anything,
partly because they were all of the same political faith, and it seemed
an understood thing that, so far as it was humanly possible, no one
would introduce any subject which would entail controversy. When
Selwyn, who was almost too thorough a believer in the productive powers
of fiction, used to drop conversational depth-bombs, they treated him
with easy tolerance as one who was entitled to his racial
peculiarities. Sometimes they would even put to sea clinging to the
raft of one of his ideas, but one by one would grow numb and drop off
into the waters of mental indifference. They had a nice sense of
satire, and it was a delight for the American to indulge in an easy,
inconsequential banter which was full of humour without being labelled
funny; but it used to fill him with sorrow to see many of his best
controversial subjects punctured by a lazily conceived play of words.
He felt that, coming from the New World, he was in a position to give
knowledge for knowledge, but his fellow-guests were impervious to his
geographical qualifications, and persisted in their pleasant task of
rolling vocabulary along the straight grooved channels of their
well-bred thoughts.

The women were less of a type, but their little lives were so lacking
in horizon that they seemed to live in a perpetual atmosphere of
personalities. As pretty much the same topics of conversation did them
for a whole season, they were not unlike a travelling theatrical
company producing the one show wherever they went. One woman
occasioned some mirth to Selwyn by her familiarity with the obscure
royalties of Europe, whom she thrust forward on every possible
occasion. On dowager-duchesses and retired empresses she was without
parallel, and she went through life expressing perpetual regret that
she had not known you were going to Ruritania, because she would have
insisted upon your calling on her friend the Empress Lizajania.

It was perhaps an unfortunate circumstance that had brought together a
group of women none of whom was artistically accomplished, although
they were by no means lacking in social charm. Music