it was much too
badly ventilated; and Stephen Arnold, arriving late, shot like an
embarrassed arrow through the company to Alicia's side, and was still
engaged there in grieved explanation when dinner was announced.

There were pink water-lilies, and Stephen said grace--those were the
pictorial features. Half of the people had taken their seats when he
began; there was a hasty scramble, and a decorous, half-checked smile.
Hilda, at the first word of the brief formula, blushed hotly; then she
stood while he spoke, with bowed head and clasped hands, like a
reverently inclining statue. Her long lashes brushed her cheek; she drew
a kind of isolation from the way her manner underlined the office. The
civilian's wife, with a side-glance, settled it off-hand that she was
absurdly affected; and, indeed, to an acuter intelligence it might have
looked as if she took, with the artistry of habit, a cue that was not
offered.

That was the one instant, however, in which the civilian's wife,
observing the actress, was gratified; and it was so brief that she
complained afterward that Miss Howe was disappointing. She certainly
went out of her way to be normal. Since it was her daily business to
personate exceptional individuals, it seemed to be her pleasure that
night to be like everybody else. She did it on opulent lines; there was
a richness in her agreement that the going was as hard as iron on the
Ellenborough course, and a soft ingenuousness in her inquiries about
punkahs and the brain-fever bird that might have aroused suspicion, but
after a brief struggle to respond to the unusualness she ought to have
represented, Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms
instead. She expanded in the light and the glow and the circumstance;
she looked with warm pleasure at the orchids the men wore and the
jewelled necks of the women. The social essence of Alicia's little
dinner-party passed into her, and she moved her head like the civilian's
wife. She felt the champagne investing her chatter and the chatter of
the Head of the Department of Education with the most satisfying
qualities, which were only very slightly dashed when she glanced over
the brim of her glass at Stephen, sitting at the turn of the oval,
giving a gravely humble but perfunctory attention to Mrs. Barberry and
drinking water. The occasion grew before her into a gorgeous flower,
living, pulsating, and in the heart of its light and colour the petals
closed ov