anged and cautiously rustling audience, Gregory saw that Miss
Woodruff had no further thought for him.

CHAPTER III

Mrs. Forrester was dispensing tea in her lofty drawing-room which, with
its illumined heights and dim recesses, gave to the ceremony an almost
ritualistic state. Mrs. Forrester's drawing-room and Mrs. Forrester
herself were long-established features of London, and not to have sat
beneath the Louis Quinze chandelier nor have drunk tea out of the blue
Worcester cups was to have missed something significant of the typical
London spectacle.

The drawing-room seemed most characteristic when one came to it from a
fog outside, as people had done to-day, and when Mrs. Forrester was
found presiding over the blue cups. She was an old lady with auburn hair
elaborately dressed and singularly bound in snoods of velvet. She wore
flowing silken trains and loose ruffled sacques of a curious bygone cut,
and upon each wrist was clasped, mounted on a velvet band, a large
square emerald, set in heavily chased gold. The glance of her eyes was
as surprisingly youthful as the color of her hair, and her face, though
complicatedly wrinkled, had an almost girlish gaiety and vigour. Abrupt
and merry, Mrs. Forrester was arresting to the attention and rather
alarming. She swept aside bores; she selected the significant; socially
she could be rather merciless; but her kindness was without limits when
she attached herself, and in private life she suffered fools, if not
gladly at all events humorously, in the persons of her three heavy and
exemplary sons, who had married wives as unimpeachable and as
uninteresting as themselves and provided her with a multitude of
grandchildren. Mrs. Forrester fulfilled punctiliously all her duties
towards these young folk, and it never occurred to her sons and
daughters-in-law that they and their interests were not her chief
preoccupation. The energy and variety of her nature were, however,
given, to her social relations and to her personal friendships, which
were many and engrossing. These friendships were always highly
flavoured. Mrs. Forrester had a _flair_ for genius and needed no popular
accrediting to make it manifest to her. And it wasn't enough to be
merely a genius; there were many of the species, eminent and emblazoned,
who were never asked to come under the Louis Quinze chandelier. She
asked of her talented friends personal distinction, the power of being
interesting in more than