as you talk to me?"

"I have made one attempt already this evening," said St. John. "I
rather doubt that it was successful. She seems to me so very young and
inexperienced. I have promised to lend her Gibbon."

"It's not Gibbon exactly," Helen pondered. "It's the facts of life, I
think--d'you see what I mean? What really goes on, what people feel,
although they generally try to hide it? There's nothing to be frightened
of. It's so much more beautiful than the pretences--always more
interesting--always better, I should say, than _that_ kind of thing."

She nodded her head at a table near them, where two girls and two
young men were chaffing each other very loudly, and carrying on an arch
insinuating dialogue, sprinkled with endearments, about, it seemed, a
pair of stockings or a pair of legs. One of the girls was flirting a fan
and pretending to be shocked, and the sight was very unpleasant, partly
because it was obvious that the girls were secretly hostile to each
other.

"In my old age, however," Helen sighed, "I'm coming to think that it
doesn't much matter in the long run what one does: people always go
their own way--nothing will ever influence them." She nodded her head at
the supper party.

But St. John did not agree. He said that he thought one could really
make a great deal of difference by one's point of view, books and so
on, and added that few things at the present time mattered more than the
enlightenment of women. He sometimes thought that almost everything was
due to education.

In the ballroom, meanwhile, the dancers were being formed into squares
for the lancers. Arthur and Rachel, Susan and Hewet, Miss Allan and
Hughling Elliot found themselves together.

Miss Allan looked at her watch.

"Half-past one," she stated. "And I have to despatch Alexander Pope
to-morrow."

"Pope!" snorted Mr. Elliot. "Who reads Pope, I should like to know?
And as for reading about him--No, no, Miss Allan; be persuaded you will
benefit the world much more by dancing than by writing." It was one of
Mr. Elliot's affectations that nothing in the world could compare
with the delights of dancing--nothing in the world was so tedious as
literature. Thus he sought pathetically enough to ingratiate himself
with the young, and to prove to them beyond a doubt that though married
to a ninny of a wife, and rather pale and bent and careworn by his
weight of learning, he was as much alive as the youngest of them all.

"It's a q