sions, which stuck into her as she sat down, failed to
give her any reassurance. It was an admirable little volume, compiled
to meet all the social emergencies; so that, whether on the occasion
of Anniversaries, joyful or melancholy (as the classification ran),
of Banquets, social or municipal, or of Baptisms, Church of England
or sectarian, its student need never be at a loss for a pertinent
reference. Mrs. Leveret, though she had for years devoutly conned its
pages, valued it, however, rather for its moral support than for its
practical services; for though in the privacy of her own room she
commanded an army of quotations, these invariably deserted her at the
critical moment, and the only line she retained--CANST THOU DRAW OUT
LEVIATHAN WITH A HOOK?--was one she had never yet found the occasion to
apply.

To-day she felt that even the complete mastery of the volume would
hardly have insured her self-possession; for she thought it probable,
even if she DID, in some miraculous way, remember an Allusion, it would
be only to find that Osric Dane used a different volume (Mrs. Leveret
was convinced that literary people always carried them), and would
consequently not recognise her quotations.

Mrs. Leveret's sense of being adrift was intensified by the appearance
of Mrs. Ballinger's drawing-room. To a careless eye its aspect was
unchanged; but those acquainted with Mrs. Ballinger's way of
arranging her books would instantly have detected the marks of recent
perturbation. Mrs. Ballinger's province, as a member of the Lunch Club,
was the Book of the Day. On that, whatever it was, from a novel to
a treatise on experimental psychology, she was confidently,
authoritatively "up." What became of last year's books, or last week's
even; what she did with the "subjects" she had previously professed with
equal authority; no one had ever yet discovered. Her mind was an hotel
where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their
address behind, and frequently without paying for their board. It was
Mrs. Ballinger's boast that she was "abreast with the Thought of the
Day," and her pride that this advanced position should be expressed by
the books on her drawing-room table. These volumes, frequently renewed,
and almost always damp from the press, bore names generally unfamiliar
to Mrs. Leveret, and giving her, as she furtively scanned them, a
disheartening glimpse of new fields of knowledge to be breathlessly
traversed