she vanished; but Hilda went with
certainty into the corridor to find Arnold pacing up and down the red
strip of carpet, with his hands clasped behind him and his head thrust
forward, waiting for her.

They dropped together into the crowd and walked among well-dressed
women, men in civilian black and men in uniform, up and down the
pillared spaces of the ballroom. People had not been asked to dance, and
they seemed to walk about chiefly for observation. There was, of course,
the opportunity of talking and of listening to the band which discoursed
in a corner behind palms, but the distraction which is the social
Nemesis of bureaucracy was in the air, visibly increasing in the
neighbourhoods of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, and made the
commonplaces people uttered to each other disjointed and fragmentary,
while it was plain that few were aware whether music was being rendered
or not. Anyone sensitive to pervading mental currents in gatherings of
this sort would have found the relief of concentration and directness
only near the buffet that ran along one side of the room, where the
natural instinct played, without impediment, upon soup and sandwiches.

They did not look much at Hilda, even on the arm of her liveried priest.
She was a strange vessel, sailing in from beyond their ken, and her
pilot was almost as novel, yet they were incurious. Their interests were
not in any way diffused, they had one straight line and it led upward,
pausing at the personalities clerked above them, with an ultimate point
in the head of a department. The Head of the Department was the only
person unaware, when addressed, of a travelling eye in search over
his shoulder of somebody with whom it would be more advantageous
to converse. Yet there were a few people apparently not altogether
indifferent to the presence of Miss Howe. She saw them here and there,
and when Arnold said, "It must seem odd to you, but I know hardly
anybody here. We attempt no social duties," she singled out this one and
that, whom Alicia had asked to meet her, and mentioned them to him with
a warm pleasure in implying one of the advantages of belonging to the
world rather than to the cloister. Stephen knew their names and their
dignities. He received what she said with suitably impressed eyebrow
and nods of considerate assent. Hilda carried him along, as it were, in
their direction. She was full that night of a triumphant sense of her
own vitality, her success