sembled her, Diana Dombey, who did not _quite_ approve of
her, being a little uncertain yet about welcoming the New Woman, all
the Ritchies, married and unmarried, Lady Brownlow, the Duchess of
Bedford (Adeline), the Michael Fosters, most of the Stracheys (she
liked the ones I liked), the Hubert Parrys, the Ripons (how she
admired Lady Ripon, as who did not!), Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Miss
Lena Ashwell, the Bernard Shaws, the Wilfred Meynells, the H.G.
Wellses, the Sidney Webbs; and--leaving uninstanced a number of
other delightful, warm-blooded, pleasant-voiced, natural-mannered
people--the Rossiters.

Or at least, Michael Rossiter. For although you could tolerate for
his sake Mrs. Rossiter, and even find her a source of quiet
amusement, you could hardly say you liked her--not in the way you
could say it of most of the men and women I have specified. Michael
Rossiter, who comes into this story, ought really if there were a
discriminating wide-awake, up-to-date Providence--which there is
not--to have met Honoria when she was twenty. (At nineteen such a
woman is still immature; and moreover until she was twenty, Honoria
had not mastered the Binomial Theorem.) Had he married her at that
period he would himself have been about twenty-seven which is quite
soon enough for a great man of science to marry and procreate
geniuses. But as a matter of fact, when he came down to Cambridge
in--? 1892--to deliver a course of Vacation lectures on embryology,
he was already two years married to Linda Bennet, an heiress, the
daughter and niece (her parents died when she was young and she
lived with an uncle and aunt) of very rich manufacturers at Leeds.

So, though his eye, quick to discern beauty, and his brain tentacles
ready to detect intelligence combined with a lovely nature, soon
singled out Honoria Fraser, amongst a host of less attractive
girl-graduates, he had no more thought of falling in love with her
than with a princess of the blood-royal. He might, long since,
within a month of his marriage have found out his Linda to be a
pretty little simpleton with a brain incapable of taking in any more
than it had learnt at a Scarborough finishing school; but he was too
instinctive a gentleman to indulge in any flirtation, any deviation
whatever from mental or physical monogamy. For he remembered always
that it was his wife's money which had enabled him to pursue his
great researches without the heart-breaking delays, limitations and