d too, and they
parted laughing. He remembered that he had made a marked effect (though
not one of laughter) on the tailor by quickly returning the question,
"Are you?" And his unpremeditated stroke with the Countess was similar.
When he had got ten yards on his way towards Harold Etches and a fiver
he felt something in his hand. The Countess's fan was sticking between
his fingers. It had unhooked itself from her chain. He furtively
pocketed it.

VIII

"Just the same as dancing with any other woman!" He told this untruth in
reply to a question from Shillitoe. It was the least he could do. And
any other young man in his place would have said as much or as little.

"What was she laughing at?" somebody asked.

"Ah!" said Denry, judiciously, "wouldn't you like to know?"

"Here you are!" said Etches, with an inattentive, plutocratic gesture
handing over a five-pound note. He was one of those men who never
venture out of sight of a bank without a banknote in their pockets--
"Because you never know what may turn up."

Denry accepted the note with a silent nod. In some directions he was
gifted with astounding insight, and he could read in the faces of the
haughty males surrounding him that in the space of a few minutes he had
risen from nonentity into renown. He had become a great man. He did not
at once realise how great, how renowned. But he saw enough in those eyes
to cause his heart to glow, and to rouse in his brain those ambitious
dreams which stirred him upon occasion. He left the group; he had need
of motion, and also of that mental privacy which one may enjoy while
strolling about on a crowded floor in the midst of a considerable noise.
He noticed that the Countess was now dancing with an alderman, and that
the alderman, by an oversight inexcusable in an alderman, was not
wearing gloves. It was he, Denry, who had broken the ice, so that the
alderman might plunge into the water. He first had danced with the
Countess, and had rendered her up to the alderman with delicious gaiety
upon her countenance. By instinct he knew Bursley, and he knew that he
would be talked of. He knew that, for a time at any rate, he would
displace even Jos Curtenty, that almost professional "card" and amuser
of burgesses, in the popular imagination. It would not be: "Have ye
heard Jos's latest?" It would be: "Have ye heard about young Machin,
Duncalf's clerk?"

Then he met Ruth Earp, strolling in the opposite direction with a young
gi