e, Bessie, and I. It was a
pleasant party, and it could not have been otherwise with Miss Van as
the hostess. There was a little dancing,--not enough to entitle it to be
called a dancing-party; a little card-playing,--not enough to make it a
card-party; and there was a vast amount of bright and pleasant
conversation, but still one could not name it a _converzatione_. The
company was remarkably good, and Miss Van's management, although
imperceptible, was so skilful that her guests found themselves at their
ease, and enjoying themselves, without knowing that their pleasure was
more than half due to her _finesse_.

George was quite a lion, and I envied his easy tact, his unconscious
grace of manner, and his faculty of saying bright things without effort.
He and Miss Van got on famously together, and she found him an efficient
and trustworthy aid in her capacity as hostess.

Mrs. Pinkerton made a lovely wall-flower, and I could not refrain from a
wicked chuckle when I saw her sitting on a sofa, exchanging commonplaces
with a puffing dowager. Presently, however, I noticed that she had gone,
and I found that Mr. Desmond had been kind enough to relieve me from the
onerous duty of taking her down to supper.

I wish I had a printed bill of fare of that supper, for even George,
fresh from Vefour's and the Trois Freres Provencaux, acknowledged that
it was sublime, magnificent, perfect. We men folks, in fact, talked so
much about it afterwards, that Bessie rebuked us by remarking that "men
didn't care about anything so much as eating."

As Fred Marston remarked to me, while helping himself a third time to
the salad, "It's a stunning old lay-out, isn't it!" His wife was there,
dressed "to kill," as he himself said, and dancing with every gentleman
she could decoy into asking her.

After we had come up from the supper-room, Fred Marston pulled me into a
corner, and inflicted on me a volley of stinging observations about the
people in the room. George, Bessie, Mrs. Pinkerton, and Miss Van were, I
supposed, in one of the other rooms; I had lost sight of them.

"Old Jenks lost a cool hundred thousand fighting the tiger at Saratoga,
this last summer," said Fred. "I had it from a man who backed him. Do
you know that young widow talking with him near the end of the piano?
No? Why, that's Mrs. Delascelles, and a devil of a little piece she
is,--twice divorced and once widowed, and she isn't a day over
twenty-five. You ought to know he