Sên King-lo did neither. She met him again at the Ludlows’. He did not ask her to dance—though he danced several times. She was sincerely grateful that he did not. But he sought her out, thanked her for her kindness in writing—and in accepting—his posy, and chatted on until a partner claimed her.
She noticed that Mr. Sên danced exceedingly well and that his evening clothes suited him.
CHAPTER IX
“Charlie,” Lady Snow said to her husband, almost a month later at dinner, “I made a new acquaintance today at Mrs. Ransome’s, and—I don’t know what you’ll say—I asked him to call.”
“You usually do, don’t you?” Sir Charles commented. “Why should I waste words over so invariable a habit, my dear?”
“I certainly like to know people—what else is there for me to do with you shut up all day over your silly papers?”
“I do not doubt you would find them so,” Sir Charles admitted dryly.
“We both were lunching there. I found him interesting—different somehow from any one I know. My new acquaintance is a man, did I say?”
“Quite unnecessary—but you did.”
Emma Snow laughed. She plumed herself on her “affairs,” and lived in desperate hope that some day one of them would attract her husband’s attention sufficiently to wean him a little from his dense absorption in the “silly business” his country paid him to attend to—and incidentally had knighted him that he might do it the more effectively in a country that proclaimed its scorn of all such fictitious honors, but at the same time received them with very marked favor and attention.