f
those who did, as he proved when the numbers buzzed openly. Times were
masculine; the excitement on the eve of so great a crisis, and Diana's
comprehension of it and fine heading cry, put that weak matter aside.
Moreover, he was taught to suppose himself as welcome a guest as Dacier;
and the cook could stand criticism; the wines--wonderful to say of a
lady's table--were trusty; the talk, on the political evenings and the
social and anecdotal supper-nights, ran always in perfect accord with
his ideal of the conversational orchestra: an improvized harmony,
unmatched elsewhere. She did not, he considered, so perfectly assort her
dinner-guests; that was her one fault. She had therefore to strain her
adroitness to cover their deficiencies and fuse them. But what other
woman could have done it! She led superbly. If an Irishman was present,
she kept him from overflooding, managed to extract just the flavour
of him, the smack of salt. She did even, at Whitmonby's table, on a
red-letter Sunday evening, in concert with him and the Dean, bring down
that cataract, the Bodleian, to the levels of interchanging dialogue
by seasonable touches, inimitably done, and never done before. Sullivan
Smith, unbridled in the middle of dinner, was docile to her. 'Irishmen;'
she said, pleading on their behalf to Whitmonby, who pronounced the race
too raw for an Olympian feast, 'are invaluable if you hang them up to
smoke and cure'; and the master of social converse could not deny that
they were responsive to her magic. The supper-nights were mainly devoted
to Percy's friends. He brought as many as he pleased, and as often as it
pleased him; and it was her pride to provide Cleopatra banquets for the
lover whose anxieties were soothed by them, and to whom she sacrificed
her name willingly in return for a generosity that certain chance
whispers of her heart elevated to the pitch of measureless.

So they wore through the Session and the Autumn, clouds heavier, the
League drumming, the cry of Ireland 'ominously Banshee,' as she wrote to
Emma.

CHAPTER XXX. IN WHICH THERE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN
AFTERTASTE

'But Tony lives!' Emma Dunstane cried, on her solitary height, with the
full accent of envy marking the verb; and when she wrote enviously to
her friend of the life among bright intelligences, and of talk worth
hearing, it was a happy signification that health, frail though it might
be, had grown importunate for some of the pl