d with aesthetic fashions, recognized that
the rooms had an attractive appearance, and set off Nan's beauty to the
best advantage. He fell easily and naturally into the position which his
good fortune had marked out for him, and thought, in spite of certain
bitter drops, in spite of a touch of gall in the honey, and a suspected
thorn on the rose, in spite of a cloud no bigger than a man's hand in an
otherwise clear sky, that Fate had on the whole been very kind to him.

Nan's first appearance as a bride was at her brother's house. Lady
Pynsent's whole soul was wrapped up in the art and mystery of
entertaining, and she hailed this opportunity of welcoming the Campions
into her "set" with unfeigned joy. Her gifts as a hostess had been her
chief recommendation in Sir John's eyes when he married her; he would
never have ventured to espouse a woman who could not play her part in
the drawing-room as well as he could play his part in the club.

A few days after the Campions' arrival in town, therefore, the Pynsents
gave a dinner at their own house, to which Lady Pynsent had invited a
number of men, Sydney Campion amongst the number, whom Sir John desired
to assemble together. The Benedicts came with their wives, and Nan made
her first entry into the charmed circle of matrons, where Sydney hoped
that she would one day lead and rule.

Sir John had an object in gathering these half-dozen congenial spirits
round his table. He always had, or invented, an object for his acts,
whatever they might be; a dinner party at home would have bored him
grievously if he could not have invested it with a distinct political
purpose. And, indeed, it was this power of throwing fine dust in his own
eyes which first made his party regard him as an important social
factor, worthy of being taken seriously at his own valuation. The spirit
of the age was just as strong in him, though in a somewhat different
sense, as it was in Lord Montagu Plumley, one of his guests on the
present occasion, who had shot up like a meteor from the comparative
obscurity of cadetship in a ducal family to the front rank of the Tory
pretenders, mainly by ticketing his own valuation on his breast, and
keeping himself perpetually front foremost to the world. The fault was
not so much Lord Montagu's as that of the age in which he lived. He had
merit, and he felt his strength, precisely as Sir John felt his strength
as a social pioneer, but in a generation of talented mediocriti