world of literature and politics,
had died only the year before. Gregory remembered him as a vindictive
and portentous old man presiding at Miss Scrotton's tea-parties in a
black silk skull-cap, and one could but admire in Miss Scrotton the
reverence and devotion that had not only borne with but gloried in him.
If the amplitude of his mantle had not descended upon her one might
metaphorically say that the black skull-cap had. Gregory felt that he
might have liked Eleanor better if she hadn't been so unintermittently
and unilluminatingly intelligent. She wrote scholarly articles in the
graver reviews--articles that he invariably skipped--she was always
armed with an appreciation and she had the air of thinking the
intellectual reputation of London very much her responsibility. Above
all she was dowered with an overwhelming power of enthusiasm. Eleanor
dressed well and had a handsome, commanding profile with small,
compressed lips and large, prominent, melancholy eyes that wickedly
reminded Gregory of the eyes of a beetle. Beneath the black feather boa
that was thrown round her neck, her thin shoulder-blades, while she
talked to Mrs. Forrester and sketched with pouncing fingers the phrasing
of certain passages, jerked and vibrated oddly. Mrs. Forrester nodded,
smiled, acquiesced. She was rather fond of Eleanor. Their talk was for
each other. Miss Woodruff, unheeded, but with nothing of the air of one
consciously insignificant, sat looking before her. Beside Eleanor's
vehemence and Mrs. Forrester's vivacity she made Gregory think of a
tranquil landscape seen at dawn.

He was thus thinking, and looking at her, when, as though
sub-consciously aware of his gaze, she suddenly turned her head and
looked round at him.

Her eyes, in the long moment while their glances were interchanged, were
so clear and deliberate, so unmoved by anything but a certain surprise,
that he felt no impulse to pretend politely that he had not been caught
staring. They scrutinized each other, gravely, serenely, intently, until
a thunder of applause, like a tidal wave surging over the hall, seemed
to engulf their gaze. Madame Okraska was once more emerging. Miss
Scrotton, catching up her boa, her programme and her fan, scuttled back
to her seat with an air of desperate gravity; Sir Alliston returned to
his; Mrs. Forrester welcomed him with a smile and a finger at her lips;
and as the pianist seated herself and cast a long glance over the still
disarr