him, "What's the dead bird going to be on Saturday, Filly?" he put it
generously at her service. Among the friends of Mr. Stanhope and his
company were also several gentlemen, content, for their personal effect,
with the lustre they shed upon the Stock Exchange--gentlemen of high
finance, who wrote their names at the end of directors' reports, but
never in the visitors' book at Government House, who were little more
to the Calcutta world than published receipts for so many lakhs, except
when they were seen now and then driving, in fleet dogcarts across the
Maidan toward comfortable suburban residences where ladies were not
entertained. They were extremely, curiously, devoted to business; but if
they allowed themselves any amusement other than company promoting,
it was the theatre, of which their appreciation had sometimes an odd
relation to the merits of performance. This supper, on the part of Miss
Beryl Stace and one or two others of Mr. Stanhope's artistes, might have
been considered a return of hospitality to these gentlemen, since the
suburban residences stood lavishly open to the profession.

Altogether, perhaps, there were fifty people, and an eye that looked for
the sentiment, the pity of things, would have distinguished at once
on about half the faces, especially those of the women, the used,
underlined look that spoke of the continual play of muscle and forcing
of feeling. It gave them a shabbily complicated air, contrasting in a
strained and sorry way even, with the countenances of the brokers and
bankers, where nature had laid on a smooth wash and experience had not
interfered. They were all gay and enthusiastic as Miss Howe entered,
they loafed forward, broad shirt-fronts lustrous, fat hands in financial
pockets, with their admiration, and Fillimore put out his cigarette.
Hilda came down among them from the summit of her achievement, clasping
their various hands. They were all personally responsible for her
success, she made them feel that, and they expanded in the conviction.
She moved in a kind of tide of infectious vitality, subtly drawing from
every human flavour in the room the power to hold and show something
akin to it in herself, a fugitive assimilation floating in the lamplight
with the odour of the flowers and the soup, to be extinguished with the
occasion. They looked at her up and down the table with an odd smiling
attraction, they told each other that she was in great form. Mr.
Fillimore was of