ered back to it, wounded, bleeding,
blinded, from the riot of the raw--or, to put the whole experience more
prettily, no doubt, from excesses of light.

II

If he went in, however, with something of his more or less inevitable
scowl, there were really, at the moment, two rather valid reasons for
screened observation; the first of these being that the whole place
seemed to reflect as never before the lustre of Mrs. Worthingham's own
polished and prosperous little person--to smile, it struck him, with her
smile, to twinkle not only with the gleam of her lovely teeth, but with
that of all her rings and brooches and bangles and other gewgaws,
to curl and spasmodically cluster as in emulation of her charming
complicated yellow tresses, to surround the most animated of
pink-and-white, of ruffled and ribboned, of frilled and festooned
Dresden china shepherdesses with exactly the right system of rococo
curves and convolutions and other flourishes, a perfect bower of painted
and gilded and moulded conceits. The second ground of this immediate
impression of scenic extravagance, almost as if the curtain rose for him
to the first act of some small and expensively mounted comic opera,
was that she hadn't, after all, awaited him in fond singleness, but
had again just a trifle inconsiderately exposed him to the drawback of
having to reckon, for whatever design he might amiably entertain, with
the presence of a third and quite superfluous person, a small black
insignificant but none the less oppressive stranger. It was odd how,
on the instant, the little lady engaged with her did affect him as
comparatively black--very much as if that had absolutely, in such a
medium, to be the graceless appearance of any item not positively of
some fresh shade of a light colour or of some pretty pretension to a
charming twist. Any witness of their meeting, his hostess should surely
have felt, would have been a false note in the whole rosy glow; but
what note so false as that of the dingy little presence that she might
actually, by a refinement of her perhaps always too visible study of
effect, have provided as a positive contrast or foil? whose name and
intervention, moreover, she appeared to be no more moved to mention and
account for than she might have been to "present"--whether as stretched
at her feet or erect upon disciplined haunches--some shaggy old
domesticated terrier or poodle.

Extraordinarily, after he had been in the room five m