"The Rendels? Are they here?" said Wentworth, with much interest.
"So it says here. What is she like?" said Lady Chaloner. "Would she help?"
"I am not sure," said Wentworth. "She's in mourning, and very quiet—but very charming."
"Thank you," said the Princess with a gay laugh. "I am sure that is a compliment à mon adresse. I know what you mean when you say that very quiet women are charming. Let us go away, Moricourt; we are too noisy for Mr. Wentworth."
"You are too bad, Maddy, really," said Lady Chaloner, smiling at this brilliant sally.
"Ich bitte sehr," said Wentworth to the Princess, with a little bow, as he took up the paper and looked for the address of the Rendels. "Pavillon du Jardin, Hôtel de Londres—I must go and look them up," he said.
"You might beat them up to come and buy, at any rate," said Lady Chaloner, "if they can't do anything else."
"I will do what I can," said Wentworth with a smile, reflecting as he walked off what a strange blurring of the focus of life there is when, everything being concentrated on to one particular purpose, whether it be a bazaar, an election, or the giving of a ball, all the human beings one encounters are considered from the point of view of their fitness to one particular end—in the aspect of a buyer or seller, as a voter, as a partner, as the case may be. There was no doubt that at this moment the whole of mankind were expected to fit somehow into Lady Chaloner's pattern: to be useful for the bazaar, or to be thrown away as useless.
As Wentworth turned away he exchanged greetings with a jovial important-looking personage coming in the other direction, no other than Mr. Pateley, exhaling prosperity as he came. The completion of the Cape to Cairo railway, and the reinstatement in public opinion of the 'Equator' Mine, proved to be of gold after all—let alone certain fortunate pecuniary transactions connected with that reinstatement—had given Pateley both political and material satisfaction. The Arbiter was advancing more triumphantly than ever, and its editor was a person of increasing consideration and influence.