The second of July was warm and fine: an open motor would have pleased Mr. Clutterbuck for the run to town,—but Mrs. Clutterbuck, Mrs. Clutterbuck knew! It was in the Limousine that they swept up the London Road, past the Palace and round into St. James's Place. Mr. Clutterbuck, who had long secretly wondered how those great houses upon the Park were approached at all, and who had half believed that some royal entry, hidden from the vulgar gaze, led into them, saw this great mystery solved: he was silent upon his discovery. He wondered whether one should tell the motor to go into the stables of the house, or what: and again Mrs. Clutterbuck knew. She left it for the motor man and the big flunkeys to thresh out between them.
When they were at table the many lights, the much wine and the more talk entered her husband's soul and warmed it. The lights greatly pleased him; the wine he drank freely. He was beginning to live.
He noted curiously the faces round the great table, and asked his neighbour the names of more than one; that neighbour was Mrs. Carey, than whom he could have had no better guide, for she knew every face in London, to the number of two hundred or more. She pointed out the large, beneficent features of the Duke of Battersea where he sat at Mary Smith's right, hardly able to take his eyes from her face. Mr. Clutterbuck in his turn gazed long and with increasing awe at the man whose name stood for the power of England in so many distant harbours, and whose career in finance was the model and the envy of all his own society. He strained to listen and catch some word falling from his lips, but the hubbub was too loud. The bright young laughing face to his left was that of Charlie Fitzgerald, but he did not need the information, for Mary Smith had been careful to introduce the lad with an unmistakable intonation, and, as though by inadvertence, twice over. The tall, square-faced, whiskered, spectacled man opposite who sipped his soup as though every taste of it were to be thought out and appreciated, was, he learnt, Mr. William Bailey, the brother of his hostess; and as Mrs. Carey told him that name, she laughed discreetly, for the eccentricities of Mr. William Bailey, though they were not always harmless, were never without point to women of Mrs. Carey's superficial character. She saw nothing in them but matter for her own amusement.
Nothing perhaps struck Mr. Clutterbuck more in the great society he had entered than the superb ease which distinguished it. Every member of that world seemed free to pursue his own appetite or inclination without restraint of form, and yet the whole was bound by just that invisible limit which is the framework of good breeding. Here on his right was Lord Steyning, talking at the top of his voice; a little nearer Charlie Fitzgerald was whispering across his neighbour, Miss Carey, to another guest whose name Mr. Clutterbuck did not know. The Duke of Battersea felt no necessity to talk to any one beside his hostess, or to take his eyes for more than a moment from her face; while Mr. William Bailey shocked no one by maintaining a perfect silence, and staring gloomily through his spectacles at a "Reynolds" of his great grandfather, the Nabob, which he had frequently declared in mixed company to be a forgery. It was this atmosphere of freedom that gave Mr. Clutterbuck his chief pleasure in an evening which he heartily, thoroughly, and uninterruptedly enjoyed.
When the women had gone away and the men were sitting at their ease, with the silent William Bailey for host, a maze of acute interest surrounded the merchant; he could hear the Duke of Battersea, a little grumpy in the absence of the hostess, praising Lord Steyning to his face for the arrangement of his garden, and turning his back on Mr. Bailey, which gentleman, speaking for almost the first time that evening, shoved up close to Mr. Clutterbuck and maintained his character for oddity by asking how he liked the Peabody Yid.
Mr. Clutterbuck, uncertain whether this were a novel, a play, or a new game, but unwilling to betray his ignorance, said that it depended upon taste.
"It does," said Mr. Bailey, with emphasis; "it's a jolly house, isn't it?"
Mr. Clutterbuck affirmed the grandeur and admirable appointment of the house, but he could not help wondering whether William Bailey would have been more pleased if he had found something to criticise. Then, as Charlie Fitzgerald turned to talk to Mr. Clutterbuck, William Bailey relapsed again into his silence, an attitude of mind which he diversified in no way save by pulling out a pencil and sketching, with some exaggeration of the ears, nape, and curled ringlets, the back view presented to him by the venerable Duke of Battersea.
Upstairs, Mary Smith, squatting familiarly beside Mrs. Clutterbuck, giggled into her private ear with that delightful familiarity which had ever put her guests into her intimate confidence, and swept away every vestige of gêne and of disparity in status. This charm of manner it was for which those whom she still honoured chiefly loved her, and which those whom she had seen fit to drop most poignantly regretted.
Upon Mrs. Clutterbuck, as she reclined on a Tutu Louis XVII., in an attitude full of charm and of repose yet instinct with self-control, the spell of Mary Smith was powerful indeed. Her talk was of the great—and of their secretaries. She remembered stories of ambassadors, and of their secretaries as well; and in what she had to say concerning Secretaries of State, yet other secretaries of these secretaries appeared—unpaid secretaries and under-secretaries, parliamentary secretaries, and common negligible secretaries who did secretarial work. The functions, position, and weight of a secretary had never seemed so clear to Mrs. Clutterbuck before; nay, until that moment she had given but little heed to the secretary's trade. She saw it now.