magnificently bejewelled women and presumably brave, certainly
well-groomed and handsome men. The excellence of the music, the masses
of flowers, the number of great names and well-advertised society
beauties present, would subsequently provide material for long and
eulogistic paragraphs in the half-penny press and the Ladies' Weeklies.

Mildred enjoyed it as a spectacle rather than as a ball, for she knew
few people there, and the young political men whom she had met at her
uncle's parties were too much engaged with ladies of more importance, to
whom they were related or to whom they owed social attention, to write
their names more than once on her programme. One of these, however,
asked her if she had noticed how harassed both Lord Ipswich and Lady
Augusta looked. Goring's speech, he said, at the Fothering by-election
was reported and commented upon in all the papers, and had given
tremendous offence to the leaders of his party; while the fact that he
had not turned up in time for the ball must be an additional cross to
his wife, who made such a firm stand against the social separation of
married couples.

When Mildred returned to her uncle she found him the centre of a group
of eminent politicians, all denouncing in more or less subdued tones the
outrageous utterances and conduct of Goring, and most declaring that
only consideration for Lord Ipswich and Lady Augusta prevented them from
publicly excommunicating the hardened offender. Others, however, while
admitting the outrage, urged that he was too brilliant a young man to be
lightly thrown away, and advised patience, combined with the
disciplinary rod. Sir John was of the excommunicatory party. Later in
the evening he disappeared into some remote smoking or card-room, not so
much forgetting his niece as taking it for granted that she was, as
usual, surrounded by friends and admirers of both sexes. But a detached
personality, however brilliant, is apt to be submerged in such a crowd
of social eminences, bound together by ties of blood, of interests, and
of habit, as filled the salons of Ipswich House. Mildred walked around
the show contentedly enough for a time, receiving a smile here and a
pleasant word there from such of her acquaintances as she chanced upon,
but practically alone. And being alone, she found herself yielding to a
vulgar envy of richer women's clothes and jewels. Her dress, with which
she had been pleased, looked ordinary beside the creations of gr