childish unspoken claim to the best of
everything--clothes, food, amusements, lovers. Doris on her side made
valiant efforts with the schoolboy. She liked boys, and prided herself
on getting on with them. But this specimen had no conversation--at any
rate for the female sex--and apparently only an appetite. He ate
steadily through the dinner, and seemed rather to resent Doris's
attempts to distract him from the task. So that presently Doris found
herself reduced to long tracts of silence, when her fan was her only
companion, and the watching of other people her only amusement.

Lord and Lady Dunstable faced each other at the sides of the table,
which was purposely narrow, so that talk could pass across it. Lady
Dunstable sat between an Ambassador and a Cabinet Minister, but Meadows
was almost directly opposite to her, and it seemed to be her chief
business to make him the hero of the occasion. It was she who drew him
into political or literary discussion with the Cabinet Minister, so that
the neighbours of each stayed their own talk to listen; she who would
insist on his repeating "that story you told me at Crosby Ledgers;" who
attacked him abruptly--rudely even, as she had done in the country--so
that he might defend himself; and when he had slipped into all her traps
one after the other, would fall back in her chair with a little
satisfied smile. Doris, silent and forgotten, could not keep her eyes
for long from the two distant figures--from this new Arthur, and the
sallow-faced, dark-eyed witch who had waved her wand over him.

_Wasn't_ she glad to see her husband courted--valued as he
deserved--borne along the growing stream of fame? What matter, if she
could only watch him from the bank?--and if the impetuous stream were
carrying him away from her? No! She wasn't glad. Some cold and deadly
thing seemed to be twining about her heart. Were they leaving the dear,
poverty-stricken, debt-pestered life behind for ever, in which, after
all, they had been so happy: she, everything to Arthur, and he, so
dependent upon her? No doubt she had been driven to despair, often, by
his careless, shiftless ways; she had thirsted for success and money;
just money enough, at least, to get along with. And now success had
come, and money was coming. And here she was, longing for the old, hard,
struggling past--hating the advent of the new and glittering future. As
she sat at Lady Dunstable's table, she seemed to see the little room in
t