re mostly such an immense secret that they could not be told
fairly if she were there, and she had their privacy on her conscience.
There was an exception however; when Selina expected Americans she
naturally asked her to stay at home: not apparently so much because
their conversation would be good for her as because hers would be good
for them.

One Sunday, about the middle of May, Laura Wing prepared herself to go
and see Lady Davenant, who had made a long absence from town at Easter
but would now have returned. The weather was charming, she had from the
first established her right to tread the London streets alone (if she
was a poor girl she could have the detachment as well as the
helplessness of it) and she promised herself the pleasure of a walk
along the park, where the new grass was bright. A moment before she
quitted the house her sister sent for her to the drawing-room; the
servant gave her a note scrawled in pencil: 'That man from New York is
here--Mr. Wendover, who brought me the introduction the other day from
the Schoolings. He's rather a dose--you must positively come down and
talk to him. Take him out with you if you can.' The description was not
alluring, but Selina had never made a request of her to which the girl
had not instantly responded: it seemed to her she was there for that.
She joined the circle in the drawing-room and found that it consisted
of five persons, one of whom was Lady Ringrose. Lady Ringrose was at all
times and in all places a fitful apparition; she had described herself
to Laura during her visit at Mellows as 'a bird on the branch.' She had
no fixed habit of receiving on Sunday, she was in and out as she liked,
and she was one of the few specimens of her sex who, in Grosvenor Place,
ever turned up, as she said, on the occasions to which I allude. Of the
three gentlemen two were known to Laura; she could have told you at
least that the big one with the red hair was in the Guards and the other
in the Rifles; the latter looked like a rosy child and as if he ought to
be sent up to play with Geordie and Ferdy: his social nickname indeed
was the Baby. Selina's admirers were of all ages--they ranged from
infants to octogenarians.

She introduced the third gentleman to her sister; a tall, fair, slender
young man who suggested that he had made a mistake in the shade of his
tight, perpendicular coat, ordering it of too heavenly a blue. This
added however to the candour of his appearance,