her rounded temples by
hydraulic pressure. Her mouth was large and rather loose; it had grown
baggy by much speaking on public platforms--a fearsome thing in a woman.
Her face was large and round and white. Her eyes were dull. Long
ago there must have been depressing moments in the life of Julia P.
Mangles--moments spent in front of her mirror. But, like the woman
of spirit that she was, she had determined that, if she could not be
beautiful, she could at all events be great.

One self-deception leads to another. Miss Mangles sat down and accepted
Lady Orlay's invitation in the full and perfect conviction that she owed
it to her greatness.

"Are they abstainers?" she asked, reflectively, going back in her mind
over the causes she had championed.

"Nay," replied Joseph, winking gravely at a policeman in Northumberland
Avenue.

"Perhaps Lord Orlay is open to conviction."

"If you tackle Orlay, you'll find you've bitten off a bigger bit than
you can chew," replied Joseph, who had a singular habit of lapsing into
the vulgarest slang when Julia mounted her high horse in the presence of
himself only. When others were present Mr. Mangles seemed to take a sort
of pride in this great woman. Let those explain the attitude who can.

Lady Orlay's entertainments were popularly said to be too crowded, and
no one knew this better than Lady Orlay.

"Let us ask them all and be done with them," she said; and had said it
for thirty years, ever since she had begun a social existence with no
other prospects than that which lay in her husband's brain--then plain
Mr. Orlay. She had never "done with them," had never secured that
peaceful domestic leisure which had always been her dream and her
husband's dream, and would never secure it. For these were two persons,
now old and white-haired and celebrated, who lived in the great world,
and had a supreme contempt for it.

The Mangleses were among the first to arrive, Julia in a dress of
rich black silk, with some green about it, and a number of iridescent
beetle-wings serving as a relief. Miss Netty Cahere was a vision of pink
and self-effacing quietness.

"We shall know no one," she said, with a shrinking movement of her
shoulders as they mounted the stairs.

"Not even the waiters," replied Joseph Mangles, in his lugubrious bass,
glancing into a room where tea and coffee were set out. "But they will
soon know us."

They had not been in the room, however, five minutes before an
ac