t principles of the guests to
a severe test. Miss Notman, the housekeeper, politely threatening
retirement on a small annuity, since the memorable affair of the
oyster-omelet, decided on carrying out her design when she heard that
there was to be no supper. "My attachment to the family can bear a
great deal," she said. "But when Lady Loring deliberately gives a ball,
without a supper, I must hide my head somewhere--and it had better be
out of the house!" Taking Miss Notman as representative of a class,
the reception of the coming experiment looked, to say the least of it,
doubtful.

On the appointed evening, the guests made one agreeable discovery when
they entered the reception rooms. They were left perfectly free to amuse
themselves as they liked.

The drawing-rooms were given up to dancing; the picture gallery was
devoted to chamber music. Chess-players and card-players found remote
and quiet rooms especially prepared for them. People who cared for
nothing but talking were accommodated to perfection in a sphere of
their own. And lovers (in earnest or not in earnest) discovered, in a
dimly-lighted conservatory with many recesses, that ideal of discreet
retirement which combines solitude and society under one roof.

But the ordering of the refreshments failed, as had been foreseen, to
share in the approval conferred on the arrangement of the rooms. The
first impression was unfavorable. Lady Loring, however, knew enough of
human nature to leave results to two potent allies--experience and time.

Excepting the conservatory, the astonished guests could go nowhere
without discovering tables prettily decorated with flowers, and bearing
hundreds of little pure white china plates, loaded with nothing but
sandwiches. All varieties of opinion were consulted. People of
ordinary tastes, who liked to know what they were eating, could choose
conventional beef or ham, encased in thin slices of bread of a delicate
flavor quite new to them. Other persons, less easily pleased,
were tempted by sandwiches of _pate de fois gras_ and by exquisite
combinations of chicken and truffles, reduced to a creamy pulp which
clung to the bread like butter. Foreigners, making experiments, and not
averse to garlic, discovered the finest sausages of Germany and Italy
transformed into English sandwiches. Anchovies and sardines appealed,
in the same unexpected way, to men who desired to create an artificial
thirst--after having first ascertained that