"Why?"
"Oh, various circumstances, of late."
"They did not even ask you to sing," his friend said, in accents of some surprise.
"They dared not. Didn't you see that most of the people were strangers? How could Lady Adela be sure that she was not wounding somebody's susceptibilities by having operatic music on a Sunday evening? She knew nothing at all about half those people; they were merely names to her, that she had collected round her in order that she might count herself in among the arts."
"That ill-conditioned brute Quirk seemed to me to be dominating the whole thing," said Mangan, rather testily. "It's an awful price to pay for a few puffs. I wonder a woman like that can bear him to come near her, but she pets the baboon as if he were a King Charles spaniel. Linnie, my boy, you're no longer first favorite. I can see that; self-interest has proved too strong; the flattering little review, the complimentary little notice, has ousted you. It isn't you who are privileged to meet my Lady Morgan in the street—
'And then to gammon her, in the Examiner,
With a paragraph short and sweet.'
Well, now, tell me about that very striking-looking girl, or woman, rather, whom you took in to dinner. I asked you who she was when she came into the room."
"That was Miss Honnor Cunyngham."
"Not the salmon-fishing young lady I have heard you speak of?"