g-room.

In the room just beyond a small orchestra was playing. This was a sure
sign of a "clearance" party. Mrs. Shiffney never had an orchestra
playing alone, and steadily, through an evening unless bores and frumps
were present. "Hungarians in distress" she called these uniformed
musicians, "trying to help bores in distress and failing inevitably."

She held out her hand to Charmian with a faintly ironic smile.

"I'm so glad to see you. Ah, Mr. Heath--Benedick as the married man. I
expect you are doing something wonderful as one hears nothing about you.
The deep silence fills me with expectation."

She smiled again, and turned to speak to an old lady with fuzzy white
hair.

"One of the fuzzywuzzies who go to private views, and who insist on
knowing me once a year for my sins."

Charmian's lips tightened as she walked slowly on.

She met many people whom she knew, too many; and that evening she felt
peculiarly aware of the insignificance of Claude and herself, combined
as a "married couple," in the eyes of this society. What were they? Just
two people with fifteen hundred a year and a little house near
Kensington High Street. As an unmarried girl in Berkeley Square, with a
popular mother, possibilities had floated about her. Clever, rising men
came to that house. She had charm. She was "in" everything. Now she felt
that a sort of fiat had been pronounced, perhaps by Adelaide Shiffney,
and her following, "Charmian's dropping out."

No doubt she exaggerated. She was half conscious that she was
exaggerating. But there was surely a change in the attitude people
adopted toward her. She attributed it to Mrs. Shiffney. "Adelaide hates
Claude," she said to herself, adding a moment later the woman's reason,
"because she was in love with him before he married me, and he wouldn't
look at her." Such a hatred of Adelaide's would almost have pleased her,
had not Adelaide unfortunately been so very influential.

Claude caught sight of Mrs. Mansfield and went to join her, while
Charmian spoke to Lady Mildred Burnington, and then to Max Elliot.

Lady Mildred, whose eyes looked more feverish even than usual, and whose
face was ravaged, as if by some passion or sorrow for ever burning
within her, had a perfunctory manner which fought with her expression.
Her face was too much alive. Her manner was half dead. Only when she
played the violin was the whole woman in accord, harmonious. Then truth,
vigor, intention emerged from he