lmost despite herself, began to hope for a Te
Deum; and, hoping, she found means to be wise. She effaced herself, so
she believed, by withdrawing a little into a corner near the fire,
holding up her Conder fan open to shield her face from the glow, and
taking no part in the conversation, while listening to it with a pretty
appearance of dreaminess. She was conscious of her charming attitude,
of the line made by her slender upraised arm, and not unaware of the
soft and almost transparent beauty the light of a glowing fire gives to
delicate flesh. Nevertheless, she really tried, in a perhaps
half-hearted way, to withdraw her personality into the mist. And this
she did because she knew well that her mother, not she, was en rapport
with Claude Heath.

"I'm out of it," she said to herself, "and mother's in it."

Mrs. Shiffney had been a restraint, Lane had been a restraint. It would
be dreadful if she were the third restraining element. She would have
liked to be triumphantly active in bringing things about. Since that was
evidently quite out of the question she was resolved to go to the other
extreme.

"My only chance is to be a mouse!" she thought.

At least she would be a graceful mouse.

She gazed at the delicate figures on her Conder fan. They, those three a
little way from her, were talking now, really talking.

Mrs. Mansfield was speaking of the endeavor of certain Londoners to
raise the theater out of the rut into which it had fallen, and to make
of it something worthy to claim the attention of those who did not use
it merely for digestive purposes. She related a story of a disastrous
theater-party which she had once joined, and which had been arranged by
an aspiring woman with little sense of fitness.

"We dined with her first. She had, somehow, persuaded Burling, the
Oxford historian, Mrs. Hartford, the dear poetess who never smiles, and
her husband, and Cummerbridge, the statistician, to be of the party.
After dinner where do you think she took us?"

"To the Oxford?" said Elliot, flinging his hands round his knee and
beginning to smile.

"To front row stalls at the Criterion, where they were giving a
knockabout farce called _My Little Darling_ in which a clergyman was put
into a boiler, a guardsman hidden in a linen cupboard, and a penny
novelette duchess was forced to retreat into a shower-bath in full
activity. I confess that I laughed more than I had ever done in my life.
I sat between Burling, who l