e enthusiasm became her so
well. "And to think that I should have dared to roast the divine one in
a <i>Times</i> letter this morning!"

* * * * *

The hall and staircase of Yorkshire House were already filled with a
motley and magnificent crowd when Ashe and Kitty arrived. Kitty, still
shrouded in her cloak, pushed her way through, exchanging greetings with
friends, shrieking a little now and then for the safety of her bow and
quiver, her face flushed with pleasure and excitement. Then she
disappeared into the cloak-room, and Ashe was left to wonder how he was
going to endure his robes through the heat of the evening, and to
exchange a laughing remark or two with the Parliamentary Secretary to
the Admiralty, into whose company he had fallen.

"What are we doing it for?" he asked the young man, whose thin person
was well set off by a Tudor dress.

"Oh, don't be superior!" said the other. "I'm going to enjoy myself like
a school-boy!"

And that, indeed, seemed to be the attitude of most of the people
present. And not only of the younger members of the dazzling company.
What struck Ashe particularly, as he mingled with the crowd, was the
alacrity of the elder men. Here was a famous lawyer already nearing the
seventies, in the Lord Chancellor's garb of a great ancestor; here an
ex-Viceroy of Ireland with a son in the government, magnificent in an
Elizabethan dress, his fair bushy hair and reddish beard shining above a
doublet on which glittered a jewel given to the founder of his house by
Elizabeth's own hand; next to him, a white-haired judge in the robes of
Judge Gascoyne; a peer, no younger, at his side, in the red and blue of
Mazarin: and showing each and all in their gay complacent looks a clear
revival of that former masculine delight in splendid clothes which came
so strangely to an end with that older world on the ruins of which
Napoleon rose. So with the elder women. For this night they were young
again. They had been free to choose from all the ages a dress that
suited them; and the result of this renewal of a long-relinquished
eagerness had been in many cases to call back a bygone self, and the
tones and gestures of those years when beauty is its own chief care.

As for the young men, the young women, and the girls, the zest and
pleasure of the show shone in their eyes and movements, and spread
through the hall and up the crowded staircase, like a warm, contagious
atmosphere