stivities, and which exhilarates or
depresses--according as one is new or old to it.

Elbridge Mavering kept looking at the faces of the young men as if he
expected to see a certain one; then he turned his eyes patiently upon.
the faces around him. He had been introduced to a good many persons, but
he had come to that time of life when an introduction; unless charged
with some special interest, only adds the pain of doubt to the wearisome
encounter of unfamiliar people; and he had unconsciously put on the
severity of a man who finds himself without acquaintance where
others are meeting friends, when a small man, with a neatly trimmed
reddish-grey beard and prominent eyes, stepped in front of him, and
saluted him with the "Hello, Mavering!" of a contemporary.

His face, after a moment of question, relaxed into joyful recognition.
"Why, John Munt! is that you?" he said, and he took into his large moist
palm the dry little hand of his friend, while they both broke out into
the incoherencies of people meeting after a long time. Mr. Mavering
spoke in it voice soft yet firm, and with a certain thickness of tongue;
which gave a boyish charm to his slow, utterance, and Mr. Munt used the
sort of bronchial snuffle sometimes cultivated among us as a chest tone.
But they were cut short in their intersecting questions and exclamations
by the presence of the lady who detached herself from Mr. Munt's arm as
if to leave him the freer for his hand-shaking.

"Oh!" he said, suddenly recurring to her; "let me introduce you to
Mrs. Pasmer, Mr. Mavering," and the latter made a bow that creased his
waistcoat at about the height of Mrs. Pasmer's pretty little nose.

His waistcoat had the curve which waistcoats often describe at his age;
and his heavy shoulders were thrown well back to balance this curve.
His coat hung carelessly open; the Panama hat in his hand suggested a
certain habitual informality of dress, but his smoothly shaven large
handsome face, with its jaws slowly ruminant upon nothing, intimated the
consequence of a man accustomed to supremacy in a subordinate place.

Mrs. Pasmer looked up to acknowledge the introduction with a sort of
pseudo-respectfulness which it would be hard otherwise to describe.
Whether she divined or not that she was in the presence of a magnate of
some sort, she was rather superfluously demure in the first two or three
things she said, and was all sympathy and interest in the meeting of
these old frie