perspicacity in detecting a thing at
once so agreeable and so little advertised. He may, with a woman of this
kind, go long upon the third 'tack'--may, indeed, never know it was she
who gently 'shunted' him, still unenlightened, and left him
side-tracked, but cherishing to the end of time the soothing conviction
that he 'might an' if he would.' To the more robust order of man will
come a day of awakening, when he rubs his eyes and retreats hurriedly
with a sense of good faith injured--nay, of hopes positively betrayed.
If she were '_that_ sort,' why not hang out some signal? It wasn't
playing fair.

And so without anything so crude as a sensation, but with a retinue of
covert looks following in her train, she made her way to the young
hostess, and was there joined by two men and a middle-aged woman, who
plainly had been a beauty, and though 'gone to fat,' as the vulgar say,
had yet kept her complexion. With an air of genial authority, the
pink-cheeked Lady John Ulland proceeded to appropriate the new-comer in
the midst of a general hum of conversation, whose key to the sensitive
ear had become a little heightened since the last arrival. The women
grew more insistently vivacious in proportion as the men's minds seemed
to wander from matters they had discussed contentedly enough before.

Mrs. Freddy Tunbridge was a very popular person. It was agreed that
nobody willingly missed one of her parties. There were those who said
this was not so much because of her and Mr. Freddy, though they were
eminently likeable people; not merely because you met 'everybody' there,
and not even because of the excellence of their dinners. Notoriously
this last fact fails to appeal very powerfully to the majority of women,
and it is they, not men, who make the social reputation of the hostess.
There was in this particular case a theory, held even by those who did
not care especially about Mrs. Freddy, that hers was an 'amusing,' above
all, perhaps, a 'becoming,' house. People had a pleasant consciousness
of looking uncommon well in her pretty drawing-room. Others said it
wasn't the room, it was the lighting, which certainly was most
discerningly done--not dim, and yet so far from glaring that quite plain
people enjoyed there a brief unwonted hour of good looks. Only a limited
amount of electricity was used, and that little was carefully masked and
modulated, while the two great chandeliers each of them held aloft a
very forest of wax candles