at Lady Kitty had
probably gone out without any orders to her servants, and had now
forgotten all about her luncheon-party--a state of things to which the
Hill Street household was, no doubt, well accustomed.

"I shall claim some lunch," he thought to himself, "whatever happens.
These young people want keeping in their place. Ah!"

For he had observed, placed on a small easel, the print of Madame de
Longueville in costume, and he put up his eye-glass to look at it. He
guessed at once that its appearance there was connected with the fancy
ball which was now filling London with its fame, and he examined it with
some closeness. "Lady Kitty will make a stir in it--no doubt of that!"
he said to himself, as he turned away. "She has the keenest <i>flair</i> of
them all for what produces an effect. None of the others can touch
her--Mrs. Alcot--none of them!"

He was thinking of the other members of a certain group, at that time
well known in London society--a group characterized chiefly by the
beauty, extravagance, and audacity of the women belonging to it. It was
by no means a group of mere fashionables. It contained a large amount of
ability and accomplishment; some men of aristocratic family, who were
also men of high character, with great futures before them; some persons
from the literary or artistic world, who possessed, besides their
literary or artistic gifts, a certain art of agreeable living, and some
few others--especially young girls--admitted generally for some peculiar
quality of beauty or manner outside the ordinary canons. Money was
really presupposed by the group as a group. The life they belonged to
was a life of the rich, the houses they met in were rich houses. But
money as such had no power whatever to buy admission to their ranks; and
the members of the group were at least as impatient of the claims of
mere wealth as they were of those of mere virtue.

On the whole the group was an element of ferment and growth in the
society that had produced it. Its impatience of convention and
restraint, the exaltation of intellectual or artistic power which
prevailed in it, and even the angry opposition excited by its
pretensions and its exclusiveness, were all, perhaps, rather profitable
than harmful at that moment of our social history. Old customs were much
shaken; the new were shaping themselves, and this daring coterie of
young and brilliant people, living in one another's houses, calling one
another by their