something
or other--can it have been the jump to that butterfly?--made Mr. Pellew
conscious that if she _had_ worded a thought of the kind, it would have
been just like a female of her sort. Because he wasn't going to end up
that she wouldn't have been so very far wrong.

A name ought to be invented for these little ripples of human
intercourse, that are hardly to be called embarrassments, seeing that
their _monde_ denies their existence. We do not believe it is only
nervous and imaginative folk that are affected by them. The most prosaic
of mankind keeps a sort of internal or subjective diary of contemporary
history, many of whose entries run on such events, and are so very
unlike what their author said at the time.

The dark green fritillary did not stay long enough to make any
conversation worth the name, having an appointment with a friend in the
air. Mr. Pellew hummed _Non piu andrai farfallon amoroso_, producing
on the mind of Miss Dickenson vague impressions of the Opera,
Her Majesty's--not displaced by a Hotel in those days--tinctured
with a consciousness of Club-houses and Men of the World. This
gentleman, with his whiskers and monocular wrinkle responding to his
right-eye-glass-grip, who had as good as admitted last night that his
uncle was intimate with the late Prince Regent, was surely an example of
this singular class; which is really scarcely admissible on the domestic
hearth, owing to the purity of the latter. Possibly, however, these
impressions had nothing to do with the lady's discovery that perhaps she
ought to go in and find out what "they" were thinking of doing this
morning. It may be that it was only due to her consciousness that you
cannot--when female and single--stand alone with a live single gentleman
on a terrace, both speechless. You can walk up and down with him,
conversing vivaciously, but you mustn't come to an anchor beside him in
silence. There would be a suspicion about it of each valuing the other's
presence for its own sake, which would never do.

"Goin' in?" said the Hon. Percival. "Well--it's been very jolly out
here."

"Very pleasant, I am sure," said Miss Constance Smith-Dickenson. If
either made a diary entry out of this, it was of the slightest. She
moved away across the lawn, her skirt brushing it audibly, as the
cage-borne skirt of those days did, suggesting the advantages of
Jack-in-the-Green's costume. For Jack could leave his green on the
ground and move freely insid