le, hollow cheeks and haggard but lovely brown eyes. She
was talking to several people who were gathered about her, and never
smiled. It was impossible to imagine that she could ever smile. Her name
was Lady Mildred Burnington, and she was an admirable amateur violinist,
married to Admiral Sir Hilary Burnington, one of the Sea Lords. Max
Elliot was in the distance, talking eagerly in the midst of a group of
musicians. A tall singer, a woman from the Paris Opera Comique, stood by
him with her right hand on his arm, as if she wanted to interrupt him.
She was deathly pale, with hair like the night, ebon, and a face almost
as exaggeratedly expressive as a tragic pierrot's. People pointed her
out as Millie Deans, a Southern American never yet heard in London. She
spoke to Max Elliot, then looked round the room, with sultry, defiant
and yet anxious eyes.

As if in answer to Millie Deans's words, Max Elliot moved away with her,
and took her through the throng to Mrs. Shiffney, who turned round with
her movement of the shoulders as they came up. Charmian, watching, saw
Mrs. Shiffney's gay and careless smile, the piercing light in her eyes
as she looked swiftly at the singer, who faced her with a tragic and
determined expression. The portrait painter stood by, with his rather
protruding eyes fixed on Miss Deans.

As Charmian glanced round at the crowd and spoke to one person and
another she was seized again by her horror of being one of the unknown
lives. She saw many celebrities. She yearned to be numbered among them.
If she could even be as Mrs. Shiffney, an arbiter of taste, a setter of
fashions in admiration; if she could see people look at her, as Millie
Deans looked at Mrs. Shiffney, with the hard determination to win her
over to their side in the battle of art, she thought she could be happy.
But to be nobody, "that pretty little Charmian," "that graceful Charmian
Mansfield, but she's not half as clever as her mother"! To-night she
felt as if she could not bear it.

Mrs. Shiffney had turned away from the singer, and now her eyes rested
on Charmian. She nodded and smiled and made a beckoning motion with her
left hand. But at this moment a singer and composer, half Spanish, half
nobody knew what, who called himself Ferdinand Rades, sat down before
the piano with a lighted cigarette in his mouth and struck a few soft
chords, looking about him with a sort of sad and languid insolence and
frowning till his thick eyebrows cam