'You'll pardon me,' said Miss Marchrose, turning to him. 'If you are thinking of Matthew Arnold's introduction to the selected poems, you'll and——'
'My dear,' said Mrs. Ashton Portway, suddenly looming up opposite the reciter, 'what a memory you have!'
'Was it so long, then?' murmured a tall man with spectacles and a light wavy beard.
'I shall send you back to Paris, Mr. Dolbiac,' said Mrs. Ashton Portway, 'if you are too witty.' The hostess smiled and sniggered, but it was generally felt that Mr. Dolbiac's remark had not been in the best taste.
For a few moments Henry was alone and uncared for, and he examined his surroundings. His first conclusion was that there was not a pretty woman in the room, and his second, that this fact had not escaped the notice of several other men who were hanging about in corners. Then Mrs. Ashton Portway, having accomplished the task of receiving, beckoned him, and intimated to him that, being a lion and the king of beasts, he must roar. 'I think everyone here has done something,' she said as she took him round and forced him to roar. His roaring was a miserable fiasco, but most people mistook it for the latest fashion in roaring, and were impressed.
'Now you must take someone down to get something to eat,' she apprised him, when he had growled out soft nothings to poetesses, paragraphists, publicists, positivists, penny-a-liners, and other pale persons. 'Whom shall it be?—Ashton! What have you done?'
The phonograph had been advertised to give a reproduction of Ternina in the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, but instead it broke into the 'Washington Post,' and the room, braced to a great occasion, was horrified. Mrs. Portway, abandoning Henry, ran to silence the disastrous consequence of her husband's clumsiness. Henry, perhaps impelled by an instinctive longing, gazed absently through the open door into the passage, and there, with two other girls on a settee, he perceived Geraldine! She smiled, rose, and came towards him. She looked disconcertingly pretty; she was always at her best in the evening; and she had such eyes to gaze on him.
'You here!' she murmured.
Ordinary words, but they were enveloped in layers of feeling, as a child's simple gift may be wrapped in lovely tinted tissue-papers!