he understood this
interesting game better, he embarked upon a line of his own. Charterson
wanted a seat, and presently got it; his maiden speech on the Sugar
Bounties won a compliment from Mr. Evesham; and Harman, who would have
piloted a monoplane sooner than address the House, decided to be one of
those silent influences that work outside our national assembly. He came
to the help of an embarrassed Liberal weekly, and then, in a Fleet
Street crisis, undertook the larger share of backing the _Old Country
Gazette_, that important social and intellectual party organ. His
knighthood followed almost automatically.

Such political developments introduced a second element into the
intermittent social relations of the Harman household. Before his
knighthood and marriage Sir Isaac had participated in various public
banquets and private parties and little dinners in the vaults of the
House and elsewhere, arising out of his political intentions, and with
the appearance of a Lady Harman there came a certain urgency on the part
of those who maintain in a state of hectic dullness the social
activities of the great Liberal party. Horatio Blenker, Sir Isaac's
editor, showed a disposition to be socially very helpful, and after Mrs.
Blenker had called in a state of worldly instructiveness, there was a
little dinner at the Blenkers' to introduce young Lady Harman to the
great political world. It was the first dinner-party of her life, and
she found it dazzling rather than really agreeable.

She felt very slender and young and rather unclothed about the arms and
neck, in spite of the six hundred pound pearl necklace that had been
given to her just as she stood before the mirror in her white-and-gold
dinner dress ready to start. She had to look down at that dress ever and
again and at her shining arms to remind herself that she wasn't still in
schoolgirl clothes, and it seemed to her there was not another woman in
the room who was not fairly entitled to send her off to bed at any
moment. She had been a little nervous about the details of the dinner,
but there was nothing strange or difficult but caviare, and in that case
she waited for some one else to begin. The Chartersons were there, which
was very reassuring, and the abundant flowers on the table were a sort
of protection. The man on her right was very nice, gently voluble, and
evidently quite deaf, so that she had merely to make kind respectful
faces at him. He talked to her most o