lucky shot; for it's quite true that,
attracted by her great beauty--the most singular combination you can
fancy--boldly cut features, softened by babyish roundness of curves,
and enchanting dimples, not a wrinkle or crow-foot to be traced, an
infantine complexion, all transparent and softly pink, and this grownup
baby's face surmounted by a mass of crisp-waved, snowy, but
glitteringly snowy hair!--I hovered around her for awhile during the
evening, and could make nothing whatsoever of the oracular sentences
she let fall. With her her son, a man of twenty-six to thirty,
priggish, argumentative, contrary-minded--altogether the most cub-like
young Briton I have lately encountered. Next, a widow with two
daughters--the mother what, of all things, but a Plymouth
sister!--given to hospital and prison work, tract distribution, and
mothers' meetings--a tall, spare, gentle-faced woman, dressed with
almost Quakerish simplicity. And run over and away with by her
daughters, no question--two monstrous girls of thirty, if a day; real
grenadiers, nearly six feet high; one painfully thin and large-eyed,
the other as stout as tall, and both overpowering in spirits and
flippant or cynic smartness of talk. One, the thin one, whom I liked
best, amused me during the evening by telling me how she got rid of
bores--young, feeble little society men, brief of stature and of wit.
"I endure the little creature as long as I can, and when he has buzzed
all his little buzzes about the weather, and subjects suited to his
size, there comes a pause--a long pause, for I don't help him. Then, if
he is too young to know that he should take himself off, and he begins
desperately upon some other threadbare topic, then I act. I am seated
on a low lounge or ottoman; I begin to rise as if I caught sight of
some one I knew at a distance; and I rise, rise, slowly, slowly, but
up, up, up I go, till sometimes I stand on tiptoe, or on a hassock, my
long skirts hiding all that, and the little man, who has watched me
first idly, then curiously, gradually gets horror-struck, and finally
bursts desperately away, absolutely tongue-tied with fright."

"And no wonder!" I couldn't help saying, for she had mounted and mounted
as she described the scene, until there really was something
supernatural and alarming in the slim, white-draped length of lady, and
the height from which the big blue eyes in their hollow orbits shone
down upon me.

Then an editor and his wife--th