'Well--and cricketing,' he said ingenuously. 'I call it a swindle.'

'He talks quite a dialect of his own,' thought Mabel surprised.
'Vincent didn't. I wonder if Mr. Ashburn can.'

Mr. Ashburn, after a short period of enforced silence spent in
uncharitable feelings respecting fair-haired Mr. Pidgely, had been
suddenly attacked by the lady on his left, a plump lady with queer
comic inflections in her voice, the least touch of brogue, and a
reputation for daring originality.

'I suppose now,' she began, 'ye've read the new book they're talking
so much about--this "Illusion"? And h'wat's your private opinion? I
wonder if I'll find a man with the courage to agree with me, for _I_
said when I'd come to the last page, "Well, they may say what they
like, but I never read such weary rubbish in all me life," and I never
did!'

Mark laughed--he could not help it--but it was a laugh of real
enjoyment, without the slightest trace of pique or wounded vanity in
it. 'I'll make a confession,' he said. 'I do think myself that the
book has been luckier than it deserves--only, as the--the man who
wrote it is a--a very old friend of mine--you see, I mustn't join in
abusing it.'

Mabel heard this and liked Mark the better for it. 'I suppose he
couldn't do anything else very well without making a scene,' she
thought, 'but he did it very nicely. I hope that woman will find out
who he is though; it will be a lesson to her!' Here Mabel was not
quite fair, perhaps, for the lady had a right to her opinion, and
anything is better than humbug. But she was very needlessly pitying
Mark for having to listen to such unpalatable candour, little dreaming
how welcome it was to him, or how grateful he felt to his critic. When
Mark was free again, after an animated discussion with his candid
neighbour, in which each had amused the other and both were on the way
to becoming intimate, he found the spoony youth finishing the
description of a new figure he had seen in a _cotillon_. 'You all sit
down on chairs, don't you know,' he was saying, 'and then the rest
come through doors;' and Mabel said, with a spice of malice (for she
was being excessively bored), that that must be very pretty and
original.

Mr. Langton was chatting ponderously at his end of the table, and Mrs.
Langton was being interested at hers by an account the judge's lady
was giving of a _protege_ of hers, an imbecile, who made his living by
calling neighbours who had to be up early.