ay as the servant announced 'Miss Levering.' It
is seldom that in this particular stratum of London life anything so
uncontrolled and uncontrollable as a 'sensation' is permitted to chequer
the even distribution of subdued good humour that reigns so modestly in
the drawing-rooms of the Tunbridge world. If any one is so ill-advised
as to bring to these gatherings anything resembling a sensation, even if
it is of the less challengeable sort of striking personal beauty, the
general aim of the company is to pretend either that they see nothing
unusual in the conjunction, or that they, for their part, are impervious
to such impacts. Vida Levering's beauty was not strictly of the
_eclatant_ type. If it did--as could not be denied--arrest the eye, its
refusal to let attention go was mitigated by something in the quietness,
the disarming softness, with which the hold was maintained. Men making
her acquaintance frequently went through four distinct phases in their
feeling about her. The first was the common natural one, the instant
stirring of the pulses that beauty of any sort produces in persons
having the eye that sees. The second stage was a rousing of the instinct
to be 'on guard,' which feminine beauty not infrequently breeds in the
breasts of men. Not on guard so much against the thing itself, or even
against ready submission to it, but against allowing onlookers to be
witness of such submission. Even the very young man knows either by
experience or hearsay, that women have concentrated upon their faculty
for turning this particular weapon to account, all the skill they would
have divided among other resources had there been others. Yet the charm
is something too delicious even to desire to escape from--the impulse
centres in a determination to _seem_ untouched, immune.

The third stage in this declension from pleasure through caution to
reassurance is induced by something so gentle, so unemphatic in the Vida
Levering aspect, so much what the man thinks 'feminine,' that even the
wariest male is reassured. He comes to be almost as easy before this
particular type of allurement as he would be with the frankly plain
'good sort'; only there is all about him the exquisite aroma of a subtle
charm which he may almost persuade himself that he alone perceives,
since this softly gracious creature seems so little to insist upon
it--seems, indeed, to be herself unaware of its presence. Whereupon the
man conceives a new idea of his own