cantiness of speech in
society, coupled with the look of Minerva's owl, attached himself to
them; while Lady Aubrey, Sir John Headlam, Lord Rupert, and Mr.
Wharncliffe made a noisier and more dashing party at the other end.

'Are you still in your old quarters, Lady Aubrey?' asked Sir John
Headlam, turning his old roguish face upon her. 'That house of Nell
Gwynne's, wasn't it, in Meade Street?'

'Oh dear no! We could only get it up to May this year, and then they
made us turn out for the season, for the first time for ten years. There
is a tiresome young heir who has married a wife and wants to live in it.
I could have left a train of gunpowder and a slow match behind, I was so
cross!'

'Ah--"Reculer pour mieux _faire_ sauter!"' said Sir John, mincing out
his pun as though he loved it.

'Not bad, Sir John,' she said, looking at him calmly, 'but you have way
to make up. You were so dull the last time you took me in to dinner,
that positively----'

'You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the _Societe de
Londres_,' he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer might have seen
an angry flash in his little eyes. 'My dear Lady Aubrey, it was simply
because I had not seen you for six weeks. My education had been
neglected. I get my art and my literature from you. The last time but
one we met, you gave me the cream of three new French novels and all the
dramatic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. By the
way, have you read the _Princesse de----_?'

He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even Paris.

'I haven't,' she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed a
rapier-glance at him, 'but if I had, I should say precisely the same.
Lord Rupert, will you kindly keep Sir John in order?'

Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion
characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a modern
gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was a delusion. The casual
spectator, to borrow a famous Cambridge _mot_, invariably assumed that
all 'the time he could spare from neglecting his duties he must spend in
adorning his person.' Not at all! The _tenue_ of a dandy was never more
cleverly used to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard ambition of
a Talleyrand than in Master Frederick Wharncliffe, who was in reality
going up the ladder hand over hand, and meant very soon to be on the top
rungs.

It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certa