t rouge its cheeks and blacken its eyebrows to tell, and
to Lady Harman it was the acting chiefly and the make-up that was
visible. They didn't grip her, they didn't lift her, they failed to
convince her even of their own belief in what they supported.

Sec.4

But occasionally among the multitude of conversations that gave her
nothing, there would come some talk that illuminated and for the time
almost reconciled her to the effort and the loss of time and distraction
her social expeditions involved. One evening at one of Lady Tarvrille's
carelessly compiled parties she encountered Edgar Wilkins the novelist
and got the most suggestive glimpses of his attitude towards himself and
towards the world of intellectual ferment to which he belonged. She had
been taken down by an amiable but entirely uninteresting permanent
official who when the time came turned his stereotyped talk over to the
other side of him with a quiet mechanical indifference, and she was left
for a little while in silence until Wilkins had disengaged himself.

He was a flushed man with untidy hair, and he opened at once with an
appeal to her sympathies.

"Oh! Bother!" he said. "I say,--I've eaten that mutton. I didn't notice.
One eats too much at these affairs. One doesn't notice at the time and
then afterwards one finds out."

She was a little surprised at his gambit and could think of nothing but
a kindly murmur.

"Detestable thing," he said; "my body."

"But surely not," she tried and felt as she said it that was a trifle
bold.

"You're all right," he said making her aware he saw her. "But I've this
thing that wheezes and fattens at the slightest excuse and--it encumbers
me--bothers me to take exercise.... But I can hardly expect you to be
interested in my troubles, can I?"

He made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of card
that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded. "We
people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed of
insatiable egotists, Lady Harman. With the least excuse. Don't you think
so?"

"Not--not exceptionally," she said.

"Exceptionally," he insisted.

"It isn't my impression," she said. "You're--franker."

"But someone was telling me--you've been taking impressions of us
lately. I mean all of us people who go flapping ideas about in the air.
Somebody--was it Lady Beach-Mandarin?--was saying you'd come out looking
for Intellectual Heroes--and found Bernard S