ich might have been acquired on the Stock
Exchange and in the dressing-rooms of "leading ladies." He spoke a
faultless, colourless English, from which one felt he might pass with
equal mastery to half a dozen other languages. He enquired
patronizingly for the excellent Hubbards, asked his hostess if she did
not mean to give him a drop of tea and a cigarette, remarked that he
need not ask if Hermione was still closeted with the dress-maker, and,
on the waiter's coming in answer to his ring, ordered the tea himself,
and added a request for _fine champagne_. It was not the first time
that Garnett had seen such minor liberties taken in Mrs. Newell's
drawing-room, but they had hitherto been taken by persons who had at
least the superiority of knowing what they were permitting themselves,
whereas the young man felt almost sure that Baron Schenkelderff's
manner was the most distinguished he could achieve; and this deepened
the disgust with which, as the minutes passed, he yielded to the
conviction that the Baron was Mrs. Newell's aunt.

IV

GARNETT had always foreseen that Mrs. Newell might some day ask him to
do something he should greatly dislike. He had never gone so far as to
conjecture what it might be, but had simply felt that if he allowed his
acquaintance with her to pass from spectatorship to participation he
must be prepared to find himself, at any moment, in a queer situation.

The moment had come; and he was relieved to find that he could meet it
by refusing her request. He had not always been sure that she would
leave him this alternative. She had a way of involving people in her
complications without their being aware of it, and Garnett had pictured
himself in holes so tight that there might not be room for a wriggle.
Happily in this case he could still move freely. Nothing compelled him
to act as an intermediary between Mrs. Newell and her husband, and it
was preposterous to suppose that, even in a life of such perpetual
upheaval as hers, there were no roots which struck deeper than her
casual intimacy with himself. She had simply laid hands on him because
he happened to be within reach, and he would put himself out of reach
by leaving for London on the morrow.

Having thus inwardly asserted his independence, he felt free to let his
fancy dwell on the strangeness of the situation. He had always supposed
that Mrs. Newell, in her flight through life, must have thrown a good
many victims to the wolves, and ha