upon whose eyes very few things were
lost.

"Mrs. Romaine in?" he asked the trim maid who appeared in answer to his
ring. He noticed that she was a new maid.

"Yes, sir. What name shall I say, please, sir?"

"Mr. Brooke."

The girl looked intelligent, as if she had heard the name before. And
Mr. Brooke, following her upstairs to the drawing-room, reflected on the
quickness with which servants make themselves acquainted with their
masters' and mistresses' affairs, and the disadvantages of a
civilization in which you were at the mercy of your servants' tongues.

These reflections had no bearing on his own circumstances: they
proceeded entirely from Mr. Brooke's habit of taking general views, and
making large applications of small things.

The day was cloudy, and, although it was only five o'clock, the streets
were growing dark. The weather was chilly, moreover, and the wind blew
from the East. It was a pleasant change to enter Mrs. Romaine's
drawing-room, which was full of soft light from a glowing little fire,
full of the scent of roses and the lovely tints of Indian embroideries,
Italian tapestries, dead gold-leaf backgrounds, and china that was
beautiful as well as rare. Lady Alice Brooke, in her narrow isolation
from the world, would not have believed that so charming a room could be
found east of Great Portland Street. In which opinion she was very much
mistaken; for her belief that in "society" and society's haunts alone
could one find taste, culture, and beauty, led her to ignore the vast
number of intellectual and artistic folk who still sojourn in the dim
squares of Bloomsbury and Regent's Park. Sooth to say Lady Alice knew
absolutely nothing of the worlds of intellect and art, save by means of
an occasional article in the magazines, or a stroll through the large
picture galleries of London during the season. She was a good woman in
her way, and--also in her way--a clever one; but she had been brought up
in another atmosphere from that which her husband loved, elevated in a
totally different school, and she was not of a nature to adapt herself
to what she did not thoroughly understand.

Mrs. Romaine knew well enough that she was quite as well able to hold
her own in the fashionable world if once she obtained an entrance to it
as any Lady Alice or Lady Anybody of her acquaintance. But then the
difficulty of entering if was very great. She had not sufficient fortune
to vie with women who every year spent hu